I received a fairly good education.

One thing I always had a fair grasp on was English, and the finer niceties of spelling and grammar. I am no potential Pulitzer or Nobel winner, but I know the difference between it’s and its.  I know when to use there, their or they’re. 

I won’t say I pride myself on my grammar and spelling but I like to think that my scribbles conform roughly with the accepted spellings and the general rules of syntax.

Lately I have been having a lot of trouble.

Herself occasionally reads this, and she has a habit of finding words that I have misspelled.  Now I do have a spell checker but the little fecker isn’t very smart and will pass a “bit” with no comment when it really should have been “but”, so if I use “to” where I should have used “too” [or even “two”?] it won’t say a word.  It will just leave me to face embarrassment later in the week.

The problem is that I know how to spell.  I know the basic elements of grammar.  But somehow the signal gets confused between the brain and the keyboard.  My fingers refuse to obey commands and go off at a tangent and type something completely different.  Sometimes they omit words entirely but the strangest phenomenon [and I actually didn’t have to check the spelling of that] is where the fingers substitute words.  There have been occasions where I meant to type “there” and have typed “what” instead.  I don’t know where those words come from.

It has reached the stage where I have to weed every sentence that I have typed.  Invariably the sentence will be full of little red squiggles highlighting my efforts, and I have to go back and remove all the extra letters that have mysteriously  appeared from nowhere.  For some reason the fingers have developed a habit of inserting extra “t”s, “n”s and “p”s, at random in places where they do not belong.

I have also noticed that my eyes are in cahoots with my fingers, in that the fingers will type something strange, and the eyes will not spot it.  I can read the strange bit several times over and not notice it.  Herself does though, which is a bugger.

I don’t know if it’s the onset of senility that’s causing all this bother [and where did the extra “e” come from when I just typed causeing?].

Or maybe it’s because I am typing a hell of a lot faster these days and I’m tripping over my grammatical shoe laces?

Or there again, it could be that most of the letters on my keyboard have rubbed off with overuse.

Yes.  That’s it.

It’s my keyboard that’s dyslexic.