The Great Indian Spelling Mistake
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Like all good Indians (the kind that go to school on elephants 
) I mispell the word “believe” as “beleive” from time to time. Fortunately I think I found the perfect way to remember the right way to spell it. A friend on a mailing lists had this to say when I expressed disgust at misspelling that word again:
“Remember, beLIEve has a LIE in it.”
Thanks, that should fix my brain.
Filed by Carthik at 11:57 am under India, General
My favorite is tomorrow. If it were not for Spellbound, I would have misspelled it anyways.
Easy way to remember it:
I before E - except after C
funny.
but ei do not usually pronounce [i:] i suppose.
Hello there!
This may be an odd request, but could you tell me what the style of the desk you bought from Target is called? I have one myself, love it, and want more - but can’t find anymore on their site! I tried Google’ing “target desk”, and came across your desk picture posted on Flickr. Unfortunately, I can’t recall what it was called - but if you knew, maybe I can ask the folks at Target if it’s still out there, without having to try to describe it.
Any insight is very much appreciated!
Cordially,
Emmalee
[…]It’s funny that you believe,(no pun intended) that you made an indian mistake because I’m not an indian and I’ve made the same mistake for I don’t know how many years. Here’s another memory technique: Just remember that belIEve has an IE in it:) Besides the fun i also wanted to say thanks for the fonts I downloaded at your site. They should become pretty useful once I learn how to use them. Your site rocks.[…]
Don’t be negative Carthik! I still believe in you, ha ha! Miss you!! (I use FH’s method)
WOW! this is a good technique for me to remember! There was another word
for which I always had red re-marks in school “their” - I would inevitablely mis-spell it as “thier”!
haha! I do it with receive… of course it’s the opposite… I do it like ‘recieve’. What’s the trick in remembering this one? Is it like “receive has nothing to do with believe”?
haha…
first time here… like your blog very much Carthik… :)…
very interesting, this spelling thing… :D…
i shall add one more trick i learnt in school (and i suppose that’s now stuck in my brains with SuperGlue3.5PRO)…
how in the world does a child remember how to spell things like ‘lieutenants’(pronounced as ‘left-a-nents’ in UK English)?!… though i never (i think it stands true till date) felt the need to spell it–except for on occasions like these–, our teacher told us the ‘how-to’ anyways… you just break it up — ‘LIE-U-TEN-ANTs’ !… i felt it was a really lame way to try remember, yet, now i find that it does stick!… :D…
i suppose, gathering from your example here as well, its the LIE that makes all the difference… haha… ;D…
btw… @madcap…
so often we code things up and confuse them… we often forget the simple ways to do things… ;)…
yes, receive is not like believe… but then, both follow simple grammatical rules for vowels…
remember this from anywhere?:
“i before e
except after c
or when sounding like a
as in neighbor and weigh”
i think the first two, non complex lines, are enough to answer our queries here… ;)…
(btw, the Brit version of this mnemonic verse seems simpler, if you may,:
when the sound is ee
it’s i before e
except after c )
okay them, nice commenting here… :)…