Yesterday I was confronted (not for the first time) by a fact about myself that brought me up short, and which I do not like.  I received an email from a woman with whom I have been corresponding on and off for a couple of weeks; clearly she usually sends her correspondence through a spellchecker, but this time either she forgot, or did not have access to it.  I think she was also in a bit of a hurry, as the email was less coherent than her past communications have been.

At any rate — it’s been clear to me that she has trouble with homophones, which the spellchecker doesn’t catch at any rate, because they’re not misspellings per se.  In the email I read yesterday, she spelled the word “onus” as “owness.”  My immediate reaction was to think less of her intelligence, although she had used the word correctly and clearly knows exactly what it means … she just doesn’t know how it’s spelled.

I wonder where and how I started to associate orthography, proper punctuation, and grammar with intelligence.  In actual fact, they’re not really related … language mechanics falls more under organizational skill than intelligence.  I would not like my intelligence level to be gauged by my inability to do high-school level mathematics; why then am I so reactive about written English? 

Oddly enough, my longest relationship was with a woman who was highly intelligent, but who had virtually no writing skills at all.  We seldom e-mailed each other, however, so her lack of finesse didn’t bother me.  She spoke quite well (though she often failed to use the past perfect tense when it was warranted, which made me insane … she would say “I should have went” instead of “I should have gone”) and was intellectually curious; a great reader, and a fine thinker.  But if we’d e-mailed more frequently at the beginning of our relationship, I never would have become involved with her.  (That would actually have been a good thing, though not for any reason to do with our intellectual compatibility.)

I am trying to become more aware of these petty judgments as I try to reconsider what I really want and need from friends,  and from potential partners.  How important should it be to me how well someone writes?  As a writer myself, I know that writing well  is one of the most manipulative and controlling acts a person can perform, and one of the most compelling ways to deceive.  How valuable is it, really, to be with someone who has that skill?  And why am I so ready to exercise the inappropriate control of judgment?

I guess the owness is on me to figure all that out.