I was about eight years old when I got my first love letters. Back then children in Sweden didn’t have the same exposure to English as they do now, so the boys in my class thought they were the height of sophistication when they started sending the ‘I love you’ notes to the girls, and especially to my best friend Sofia. I met Sofia my very first day at school. I hadn’t lived in the little suburb of Stockholm for more than two months and, having spent a large part of that time at my grandparents’, I had only got to know the neighbourhood children who were older than I was and Sofia became my first class-mate ever.
She was this perfect little doll of a girl with blonde hair, blue eyes and dimples that showed as soon as she smiled. On top of that she was tiny! Even at the age of six I considered myself chubby at 30 kilos compared to her mere 24! I was the chubby plain Jane friend, the maternal one even back then. The good girl who kept an eye on things and made sure everyone was included, no one left behind. At least that’s how I remember it. And, of course Sofia was the most popular girl in the class from the moment the guys started realising girls were something different to boys. And as we turned eight they started sending love letters.
Perhaps they weren’t so much love letters as love notes. Most of them looked the same, though some of the more inventive boys had drawn pictures alongside the words. They were plain and to the point, all sporting those three magic words: ‘I love you’. There was just one problem. None of the boys knew how to spell in English, so every single love note Sofia received, as well as the eight or so I got – more as pity notes than anything serious – was misspelled. And Sofia got them by the carrier bag! Hundreds of notes, all saying ‘I love yoy’.
Even at that age I knew that it wasn’t spelled that way, and I made several attempts to point this out to the boys, even though the notes were all anonymous, sending them. But somehow it just wouldn’t stick, and the ‘I love yoy’ letters kept coming. From what I remember (which is shrouded in years gone by) the whole ‘I love yoy’-phase didn’t end until boys chasing Sofia home from school managed to stop her bike so violently that she flew over the handlebars, landed on her face suffering a broken tooth and a concussion… Parents were involved in the aftermath of that, and at least for a period the ‘I love yoy’ -notes ceased. I moved away not long after that, so I never had the joy of being best friends with the prettiest, coolest and most sought after girl in school past the age of eight, but I’m sure the letters started up again later on.
The reason I thought of all this? I passed a new graffiti while walking the dog. If done right, I don’t mind graffiti, but when it’s just some half-illiterate jerk with a spray can and no artistic merit, it kind of pisses me off from the start. When they then also manage to misspell whatever curse words, popular slang for genitalia or – like today – can’t spell ‘I love you’ correctly…
I hear ya CC, ooops….I mean, I hear you CC. Seriously, spelling seems like such a basic skill but for many people, it just isn’t. And it seems, not an important skill to learn either. Perhaps it comes back to teaching and learning in the much younger grades. Do they still have spelling bees these days? LOL
Interesting post, glad I stopped in. G
I’m far from a perfect speller myself… But it does bug me to no end! *smile*