Sometimes….you might just plop gibberish upon the page.

When I’m in the zone, I type around 100 words per minute. That’s not elite status, but I’m definitely moving. My brain, however, is processing the story much faster. Passages aren’t necessarily being fed to the page in order, and oftentimes, sentences aren’t landing with the words in their intended sequence. It’s a bit of a wires-crossed thing that requires some adaptation, patience, and editing.

An unfortunate, though sometimes hilarious consequence, is some serious gibberish. Although it breaks my rhythm, I usually delete these things immediately because they’re too horrid to live on the page another moment. However, since I started this series of Casualties posts, I’ve decided to save some of the better ones as examples of just how wrong an experienced writer can go.

As always, I’ve created some definitions, and the correct words (if I’ve deciphered them) follow that.

CASUALTIES

Hiuefully – a well-saturated color

Initiatititive – making the first move on a sexy date

Tjamls – beasts of burden that tjaverse the djesert

Habyart – a question posed to the entrants of rural art shows: “Habyart?” “Yessaidoo!”

Consticuous – something stuck to the wall and definitely out of place

Priviledge – born with the right to stand upon the precipice

Viluminous – an evil glow

Predigestion – what happens to chewed food slathered in saliva

Predamentary – the basics for stalking prey

Harbordence – a thick fog hanging heavy upon the docks

Trhaventily – seriously, I got nothing here. A flower? A kind of fancy silk lace?

CORRECT SPELLINGS

Hopefully

Initiative

Thanks

January

Conspicuous

Privilege

Voluminous

Prestidigitation

??

???

????

Sometimes, the context of the sentence helps, which is how I determined Habyart was January (my right hand was one key off). Other times, you look at a word and think, I kinda like that. So, viluminous, an evil glow now has a place in my manuscript. And occasionally, you type out Trhaventily and just shake your head as you delete it.

As you can see from this post, we’re always going to have mistyped words, but I hope it also illustrates how inspiration can come from anywhere. Good luck with your writinkf!

–Mike

---

Enjoy what you just read? Plenty more Word Casualties here. Leave a comment or like the post and we’ll ensure that you see more like this!

© Michael Wallevand, August 2021