This makes me imagine a backport of the Disklavier. I'd ask one of my friends who enjoys vacuum tubes whether they'd like to get on that, but I think it'd take up rather more space than they have to work with, and harpsichords are probably quite expensive…
Aaagh, how embarrassing - I'm such a stickler for correct spelling due to it really not being all that bloody difficult and have openly said that people who can't tell the difference between "you're" and "your" should probably just give up on life, but this is a blind spot - for some reason I can't spell "vacuum". I noticed it when going back to a webapp I wrote recently, too (in the context of vacuuming a database) and changed it all in the frontend but there are still a load of internal variables with two Cs.
Sorry, I hadn't intended to point at that so distinctly! I mostly wanted to comment on the harpsichords, but I sort of copy-edited the quoted part reflexively…
Exchanging or modifying doubled letters does seem to be a problem in many people's internal representations of English spelling. The relation to “vacuous” might help, since the latter lacks a doubled letter. Or some other way of recognizing the division of the word as “vacu+um” so that the U's don't blend together. (That's where the morpheme boundary is anyway, pretty much-in Dutch it's even spelled with a diaeresis, as “vacuüm”. Generally, morphemic decomposition yields much better predictive results for English spelling than word-for-word memorization.) Or perhaps remembering that it's the vowel and not the consonant that's doubled by associating it with “hoover”, if you find that easier.
vaccuum tubes [sic] and harpsichords
This makes me imagine a backport of the Disklavier. I'd ask one of my friends who enjoys vacuum tubes whether they'd like to get on that, but I think it'd take up rather more space than they have to work with, and harpsichords are probably quite expensive…
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Sorry, I hadn't intended to point at that so distinctly! I mostly wanted to comment on the harpsichords, but I sort of copy-edited the quoted part reflexively…
Exchanging or modifying doubled letters does seem to be a problem in many people's internal representations of English spelling. The relation to “vacuous” might help, since the latter lacks a doubled letter. Or some other way of recognizing the division of the word as “vacu+um” so that the U's don't blend together. (That's where the morpheme boundary is anyway, pretty much-in Dutch it's even spelled with a diaeresis, as “vacuüm”. Generally, morphemic decomposition yields much better predictive results for English spelling than word-for-word memorization.) Or perhaps remembering that it's the vowel and not the consonant that's doubled by associating it with “hoover”, if you find that easier.
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I thought the classic one for Serious People was the inclusion of “Referer” in HTTP/1.1.
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