Spelling Terrorists   

Amidst the press releases and publications that pour into WJR's offices each morning lay a solitary, coldly efficient, neon-yellow postcard. "Please accept this constructive correction," it read, noting an unfortunate misspelling that had sneaked into the magazine. "It's accident ally , not accident ly ."

A computer glitch, no doubt.

But reader Marjorie Schier, who kindly sent the "goof card" from the unlimited supply she receives with her $20 annual membership in the Society for the Preservation of English Language and Literature (SPELL), accepts no excuses. A former reporter and English teacher, she also has targeted President Bush (for using "enormity" incorrectly in a speech), author Larry McMurtry (who had a man being "hung" instead of "hanged" in one book), the Philadelphia Inquirer's Tony Auth (who misspelled "nemesis" in a cartoon) and Modern Maturity magazine (which left the "s" off "kudos"), among many others.

Founded in 1984 by retired advertising executive Stephen Manhard, SPELL has some 1,800 members who scour print and broadcast media in a grass-roots effort to obliterate English grammar, usage and spelling goofs.

"Some people called me a nitpicker," says Manhard, who ran the nonprofit SPELL for two years from his home in California before passing the job to a friend. "But it got to where the mistakes were so flagrant that I thought people should know better."

"Some days errors just leap out of the page," agrees Schier, who owns 32 dictionaries and has at least 32 periodicals delivered to her home in Levittown, Pennsylvania. "I've always felt that anyone who cares about language cares about getting it right."

Today SPELL is run by its third president, Richard Dowis, an executive at an Atlanta P.R. firm who edits the society's bimonthly newsletter.

"I'm more understanding of errors in the media than many members," Dowis says. "Typos made on deadline don't bother me, but the plain ignorance behind not knowing the difference between words such as 'lay' and 'lie' does. You even see those mistakes in the New York Times; TV news is worse. I recently heard one newscaster say 'try and' instead of 'try to.' That's nothing less than linguistic barbarism."

No journalist is safe, Dowis says. "I used 'its' instead of 'it's' in my newsletter column last month," he says, "and I got a ton of goof cards from the members. If I didn't know I was the one who wrote it, I'd think it was ignorance."