Wordz and speling

Do you have a certain word or words that you can just never spell correctly or words that other people use which annoy you.

At school I remember having trouble with ‘because’ until the grade 2 teacher shared the little ditty “ Big elephants can attack ugly snakes eggs” and eight was always “every indian girl has toys”. Don’t forget the song MARVELLOUS – was it the 80’s when cricket peoples had the one hit wonder song on the radio? Here it is here for a little trip down bad music lane.

So, I mastered those tricky ones, but the word guarantee remains a word that I can never spell (I just used the spell checker now) I need a new ditty, one that is easy to remember and ensures I never spell it wrong again.

I notice too many people now spell definitely  - definately, the a seems to have crept in, once it creeps in it hardly ever leaves, its just the evolution of words.

But us marketing drones only have ourselves to blame for the completely unnecessary use of the word – pro-active (I cringe as I write this horrid little phrase).  The word active will usually do quite fine, you don’t need to always be pro-active, you just need to do your job.

A little history of the word proactive - The use of the word proactive, sometimes also written pro-active was limited to the domain of experimental psychology in the 1930s. Oxford English Dictionary (OED) credits Paul Whiteley and Gerald Blankfort, citing their 1933 paper discussing proactive inhibition as the "impairment or retardation of learning or of the remembering of what is learned by effects that remain active from conditions prior to the learning". The 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning brought the word to the wider public domain. The author, Austrian existential neuropsychiatrist Dr. Viktor Emil Frankl, used the word proactive to describe a person who took responsibility for his or her life, rather than looking for causes in outside circumstances or other people. Frankl stressed the importance of courage, perseverance, individual responsibility and awareness of the existence of choices, regardless of the situation or context. 

So if you are not a psychologist, please stop using the word, it is annoying, over used and unnecessary.

Anyhoo peeps (one day to replace the word people in full) what words get up your nose? Can you help me stop writing guarntee? Will you tell all those pro-active talkers at the office to find a different word to use?