Crazy

Here in Canada, the smallest paper money in circulation is the five-dollar bill. In 1987 the government replaced the one-dollar bill with a bronze-coloured coin that by a happy accident had a picture of a loon on it, and the coin was almost immediately dubbed a loonie. There were some complaints about pocketfuls of change, but for the most part Canadians take whatever's thrown at them (it's one of our defining national traits), and the coin was accepted into everyday life. Since that experiment was a success, and since coins are so much more cost-effective than paper money, the government proposed replacing the two-dollar bill with another coin nine years later, and that, too, went into circulation--a lovely bimetallic thing with a picture of a polar bear on it. A little more grumbling this time (because that coin made it easy to walk around with truly burdensome loads of metal), but it too made its way into the Canadian purse and psyche, and likewise was given a nickname. If you had a one-dollar coin called a loonie, what would you call a two-dollar coin? We named it--and I find this clever and charming--the toonie. (I suspect, though, that we'd turf out any government that tried to circulate a five-dollar coin. What, after all, are we supposed to call it?)

I understand that some people just aren't good spellers. We all have our strengths and weaknesses: I can't read people at all and I have the worst sense of direction imaginable--I could get lost in a backyard--but since early childhood I've been a crackerjack speller (and also pretty good with math in my head). I don't quite understand how some people can be such bad spellers, though; it's almost as if they simply have no mental picture of how the English language works at all. I recently saw a hand-written sign at a store, and I can't remember all the words on it because I was so transfixed by the attempted spelling of the word "loonie" as "lunny".

It rendered me speechless. How could anyone with even the gauziest understanding of the language think that "lunn-" somehow represented the first syllable in the word "loonie"? It's true that "-un" sometimes has a long-"o" sound, as in "tune"; but that doubled consonant after a vowel has only one meaning in English, and that meaning is "short vowel alert!" Had they never seen the word "bunny" before?

Maybe the writer's first language was French, in which a doubled consonant after a vowel can mean a long vowel. Maybe the writer honestly pronounced the word with a short "-u-" (which is a dubious proposition--everyone pronounces it exactly like standard-issue "loony"). Or maybe we should issue everyone his or her own personal proofreader for such situations. I'm willing to give it a shot if the pay is right.