52
TEACH READING & WRITING
L
ook at thewords belowand decidewhich
are spelled correctly:
accomodation,
seperate, supercede, minuscule.
What did you look at? Almost certainly you
looked at the Cs and theM in
accommodation
andmay have decided that oneMwasmissing.
In
separate
youmay have noticed that the E
after the Pwas incorrect, while in
supercede
most people seemto think that is the correct
spelling (it isn’t!): supersede is spelledwith an
S because it comes fromLatin: super (above /
beyond) and sedere (to sit), so that supersede
means, literally, to sit above. The onlyword
that is correct is
minuscule
, butmany people
would expect it to be spelledwith an I rather
than aU, probably because they associate
the smallness suggested by thewordwith the
prefixmini- rather thanminus.
Thewords you just looked atmight be
termed ‘tricky’ because they include some
spellings that cause confusion. But rather
than using the term
tricky
words –which
CUSTOMERS
Tricky
DR DAVIDWAUGH
and
ANGELA GILL
are teaching fellows at DurhamUniversity
Ifcommonexceptionwordsarecausinganuisance, these
marvelloussuggestionswill taketheweightoffyourmind...
