Posted by Ed Kiser on October 28, 2004 at 01:34:10 from 205.188.116.6 user Kisered.
I have come across an oddity. There seems to be two ways of spelling the same word, "DISPATCH" and "DESPATCH", meaning a message, like a telegram, or mail note, or some other written communication.
After running a SCAN of my typed in texts, I discovered that both spellings exist many times. Now I am quite willing to accept that maybe what I am looking at is a collection of typographical errors that I myself made, so I went back to one of the books and started looking things up, and came across this little jewel in WHCH13:
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She took the despatch for them and promised to leave it at the Doctor's. Two minutes later and they would have missed her and lost a whole day. After tea, Dick and Dorothea set off home, with the lantern to light their way, Dick thinking how best to fasten his cleats to the sledge, and Dorothea thinking about the dispatch and wishing it had been a little more eloquent.
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This paragraph was located in the book (Godine publication) and BOTH spellings were found within the SAME paragraph.
While I still may have typed in the OTHER spelling instead of the indicated spelling in the book, it seems that both spellings are in the books. Now for me to verify my spellings, I now have to go look up EVERY reference to EITHER spelling, and verify that it is an exact copy from the book itself.
So apparently the book has an error, and quite possibly the other books have a similar error. What I don't understand is, which way is the ERROR and which way is right?
Should I make my text follow each instance as to its spelling, or should I correct my version to indicate the CORRECT spelling, once someone tells me what that is? Or should I keep the bad spelling in my TXT copy and show sometimes one spelling and other times the other way of spelling?
Ed Kiser, South Florida