Free Association 5

I was whingeing earlier this month about having found a typo in high-end commercial software, and guess what? I've found another. How vexing.

The screensaver for the Mac (OS 10.2.8, anyway) has a module called Flurry which is very beautiful--long filaments of colour emerging from one or more points and waving around the screen. You can choose from a long list of colours, and unfortunately, one of those colours is magneta. If you think I'm going to make some horrible pun about its being an attractive colour you are very much mistaken.

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The Mac's spellchecker accepts "whinging" but flags "whingeing". (Answers.com agrees.) Surely "whingeing" is the better spelling, as it underscores that fact that we're looking at a soft rather than a hard "-g-". Isn't that, after all, the rule? "Singing", hard "-g-"; "singeing", soft "-g-". And "bingeing" with the "-e-" so that we know it doesn't rhyme with "ringing". Isn't that simple and logical?

No, I suppose not. After all, we have "barging", and that has the soft "-g-". There doesn't seem to be any consistent rule, predictably enough. But I'm still tucking that "-e-" into "whingeing", dammit.

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I'm also spelling "dammit" "dammit". I can't bring myself to spell it "damnit", because that looks as if I'm forcing the pronunciation of the "-n-". "Dam-nit". Not a chance. I'm also spelling "crummy" "crummy", for the same reason, except with a "-b-". "Crum-bee", rhymes with Gumby. I'll take my illogical doubled "-m-", thank you.