WORDS: How absurd is that word…

At times words can be kind of strange…don’t you agree?

I was helping my little girl with her spelling homework last night and looking at her list of fourteen words. As she wrote quarter I looked at it once and then twice and then a third time and wondered if she had written it correctly.

I studied it, I brought the word closer to my face, I mean, I really analysed & scrutinised it, but it looked really strange… quarter…

She thought I was going a little around the bend. She promised me that she’d copied it down correctly and that I shouldn’t be so uppity about it. But I couldn’t help it…quarter…looked unusual…weird…I wrote and re-wrote the word about a dozen times on a scrap piece of paper…quarter…quarter…quarter…etc, until my fingertips began to pain.

In fact, the more I wrote quarter the more alien it became. It no longer looked like any word I knew, let alone what it was meant to be. Finally, I surrendered and searched the book case for the trusty dictionary and was pleasingly reassured quarter was written there loud and clear.

My daughter stared at me like I was half mad…she was probably right for in that moment I was bamboozled, baffled by a word as straightforward as quarter.

Have you ever felt the same strange sensation, writing a word copiously and furiously turns it into a nothing at all? Maybe it’s because the more you focus on it, the more your mind refuses it…
Quarter…quarter…quarter…quarter…

One thing is certain, my little girl will spell quarter right in her test at the end of the week…