How do you spell kaideloscope? Kadeliscope? Kailescope? (No, I know there's a D in there somewhere) Kaaaaa.... aahahahahhaahhah Google finally gave me an answer! KaleidoscopeYAY
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My first year at uni I found myself needing to use the word "awkward". Strangely enough, I had never written it before. It took me over an hour to look it up in the stupid dictionary, because I assumed it started with "au", and moved on to progressively less likely scenarios until I finally just read all the words starting with "a" in a pocket dictionary.
Wow, did I feel stupid. But really: "wkw"? That really is awkward.
Argh, I hate that! I think of the perfect word, and while typing think ahead a few words.. and then the perfect word is gone. So I sit there for minutes trying to reconstruct it, something that never works. Most annoying.
With a language such as English, etymology helps a lot with spelling, even when one can sound-out the word, and it would be relatively more helpful if one could not. The word kaleidoscope come from the Greek, and it breaks-down as kal-eid-o-scope
kal- is a stem meaning fair, pretty. We get words such as calligraphy (beautiful writing) from this stem. (In most words, we have a c rather than a k by virtue of the word passing through Latin before it got to us.)
eid- is a stem referring to shape or to form. It's variant, oid-, shows up in words such as android (man-formed). eid- is less common, but shows-up in words such as eidetic.
The -o- is there because, when we join to Greek stems, we need a vowel between them unless the first of the two ends with a vowel or the second of the two begins with a vowel. (We can join kal- immediately to eid- because eid- begins with a vowel; but we need a vowel between eid- and scope.)
Of course, scope refers to a seeing device. It comes from a stem skop- or skep-, referring to looking or to seeing. (
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PS: I'm kinda fudging on the explanation of the -o-. I don't figure that anyone wants a full-blown discussion of Greek morphology here, just enough to get-by.
Thank you! That'll certainly help me to remember the spelling and I'm glad too to know that the origin of "kaleidoscope" has such an appropriate meaning.
Not being able to sound out words was an advantage when I learned how to write because it was easy to memorise short words, and I didn't make the phonetic spelling mistakes that my classmates did, but with longer words it becomes harder to memorise the combination of letters, so being able to break a word down into its components is a definite advantage.
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Wow, did I feel stupid. But really: "wkw"? That really is awkward.
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Not being able to sound out words was an advantage when I learned how to write because it was easy to memorise short words, and I didn't make the phonetic spelling mistakes that my classmates did, but with longer words it becomes harder to memorise the combination of letters, so being able to break a word down into its components is a definite advantage.
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