741 Spelling lesson

Putting on my coat 45 minutes before my doctor's appointment, I said to another regular at the coffee shop, "Do you know how to spell "ophthalmology?" He hesitated a moment, then said, "Well, I'm not a very good speller, but I do know that one. O-p-t-h-a-l-m," and then he hesitated, "then it's either an "a" or an "o". "You were in trouble on the first syllable," I said. And I spelled it. "Think of 'my eyes are off, so I'm going to the ophthalmologist.'" This phth is actually more often pronounced as p-th, and is called a medial cluster. It doesn't appear in many English words, which is probably why it is so often misspelled. Diphtheria isn't very common anymore, thank goodness; Ben Franklin tried to rid our language of diphthongs, and who uses naphtha soap anymore? So other than having an appointment with an ophthalmologist, you have little use for the medial cluster.

Next to ophthalmology, the most frequently misspelled word I came across when helping people find information in the veterinary medicine library, was Salmonella enteritidis . It is the reason you don't want to eat raw cookie dough. Years ago, you only got it from cracked eggs; now the chicken has it and transmits it directly to the egg. Don't order your eggs, "over easy."

(See how much fun it is to read a librarian's blog?)

When I got outside, rain and sleet had fallen on the two inches of snow, so I had to scrape the car windows. As I was doing that, I heard a siren in the distance, coming from the direction of the main artery I was planning for the 1.5 mile drive to the ophthalmologist's office in a large medical complex. (I was planning on 15 minutes just to get into the parking garage.) When I got to that road, I could see a huge back up, so I turned around and took another route, which happened to go past my house. By that time, I was white knuckled, so I pulled into my own drive-way and called the office to cancel. My eyes may be off, but my brain knows when not to be on the streets.