A classical pedestal — would like great with a bust of Shakespeare on top. (Yahoo Images)

I see a lot of misspellings online. That’s just the nature of the written word — people will misspell words. Hell, no one knows how William Shakespeare’s surname was truly spelled, including Shakespeare himself. According to Bill Bryson’s book Shakespeare, there are only a handful of known Shakespeare signatures and the Bard spelled his last name differently every single time.

Still, I am of the opinion that if you use a word, you should know how it is spelled, especially if you are writing that word in a public forum, such as a blog, Twitter, of Facebook. All three of the above have spellcheckers that make it impossible not to notice if the word you’ve just typed is misspelled.

So imagine my dismay when reading this online:

“We put the athletes up on peddel stools…”

I had to read that TWICE before I understood that “peddel stools” was supposed to be pedestals. And then, I read it again. And again. And then I had to go look up pedestal in the dictionary because I had “peddel stool” stuck so firmly in my brain that I couldn’t remember how to spell it correctly.

So if you’re writing something and a spellchecker is available to you, use it.