Recently a friend was writing an essay and asked if I would be his "spell check."He had used the spell check on his computer but any one that has done that knows that the spell check does not make allowances for homophones.(A homophone refers to a word that sounds the same but is spelled differently, not to my friend.)Now I'm not making any claims here that I am some kind of spelling genius. I'm far from being that, but I am a fairly good speller, better than average, I suppose. I was the Asian kid in school that sat in the front seat of my English class so that my entire row could copy from my paper in a hopeless attempt to cheat their way to a passing score.I did find several mistakes including what I thought was a misspelling of the word "dilemma."I've always spelled it with an "n"....."dilemna!"Well, according to the spell check it is spelled with two "m's."So refusing to be wrong, (it's one of those character defects I've been working on) I checked a dictionary. Guess what! "dilemma!"It occurred to me that maybe the spelling I believed to be correct would be in an older dictionary. I happen to have an 1975 dictionary so I looked there: "dilemma!"I also have a 1945 dictionary: "dilemma!"You see, I had the strangest feeling that all the dictionaries had somehow been changed.Now here is the Twilight Zoney part:doing a Google search of Dilemma or Dilemna gives 37,300 results. I AM NOT THE ONLY ONE who has had this experience.Welcome to the Twilight Zone.
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