Was in the middle of shopping, about to complete the essential items to start the
delights , when I felt a strange little itch in my brain. I took a few more steps and passed the cafe on the list, but I ignored him. I realized right away that I wouldn’t be able to finish shopping with this anguish. I took my cell phone out of my pocket and there was no other: there was the spelling mistake.
Crassus, as he should be called. And in this case, a little unusual. I changed bad for bad – which has never happened to me before (they say). Not that I remember. Once the mistake was confirmed, I felt my bald head and face burn with shame. I looked around. It was as if everyone in the market was pointing their finger at me and calling me a donkey. At the cashier, the clerk passed the purchases through the reader in a silence that, to me, was pure mockery. “Debit or credit?” she asked at the fateful moment. Between the lines, however, I understood that she was questioning my ability to write. The “bye” she gave me sounded like a “never come back here, you illiterate!”.
I got in the car and drove like a madman, dodging the new radars that the mayor says are capable of catching even a pig driver pulling an armadillo out of his nose. That’s when shame gave way to revolt with a hint of depression. After all, the text had been published for a few hours and no one – no one! – corrected me. Such an obvious mistake. So… crass. So humiliating. The loneliest of writers is the one who has no one to tell him right was wrong. .
Although maybe it’s better this way. In these times when all opponents want most is a little stumble in Portuguese that serves as proof of stupidity and, since we are in this tune, bad intentions on the other side, it is even a consolation to note that the Paulo Freire generation does not have the capacity to recognize a spelling mistake. The more you evaluate it for its severity or not.
Because , let’s face it, there are errors and herros. To err evil/evil, for example, is one thing; making a mistake is quite another. Getting the whys wrong is completely forgivable; the “for me to do” is the case for the electric chair. When it comes to spelling mistakes, who makes mistakes is also relevant. A chronicler who errs is 18110345human; an education minister who makes mistakes is someone who, I don’t know, will authoritatively impose the error as a new norm. Or any other of those delusions there.
I finally got home. I left the groceries in the car and ran to the elevator. I climbed the few floors that looked like more than a hundred, chanting a mantra: evil is the opposite of good; bad is the opposite of good. In front of the front door, the key didn’t seem to fit in the lock. I thought about breaking into everything and yelling “I need to correct that mistake!!!”, but I’m really exaggerating. Once inside the apartment, I ignored the kitten’s requests for attention and ran to the computer.
Deep down (okay , not so deep) this thing of correcting others is perverse. Because the corrector seldom considers the lapse or the rush or the mental confusion after a busy day’s work. In the current belligerence, the person who corrects always assumes that the person who made a mistake is an ignorant person who, if he does not master the basics of the language, spelling, does not master its more complex elements.
As soon as I turned off the computer, I was happy to no longer live in the era of print journalism, when the doubt again. Is that snag in the above paragraph together or separate? In the kitchen, my wife was telling a dream or talking about Argentine inflation – I have no idea. Unable to continue harboring doubts about my own ability to write, I took my cell phone out of my pocket and. Ufa.
