Do I have to spell it out for you? I do? Okay, I am one of the world's worst spellers. When it comes to orthography, I'm the protagonist in a famous novel by Dostoevsky. I'm The Idiot.

These are not just the self-deprecating pronouncements of an insecure writer. These are more or less facts. At least, that's what one of my early editors told me (or, rather, screamed at me) when I wrote a column in which I witlessly called the perennially boring Super Bowl, the Super Boar (instead of the Super Bore). Ah, a spelling mistake that transformed the Super Bowl into, well, the Super Pig. Mind you, my editor was livid mostly because he'd (moronically) missed the egregious error: Super Boar made it into print, and he was duly chewed out by his boss.

I contend I was a poor speller at birth, and I only got worse with age. At first this worried me because I knew early on that I wanted to be a writer (if the whole 'rock star who couldn't play an instrument thing' didn't pan out), and yet I was dreadfully deficient in a basic skill I thought all writers needed to possess for success. Then I discovered that many famous writers, including literary lion F. Scott Fitzgerald, could not spell "boo" if their reputations and royalties depended on it, even if you spotted them two letters; in personal missives, Fitzgerald often misspelled the name of his good friend and great rival, Ernest Hemingway, giving Papa's last name an extra 'm'.

You have no idea how impressed (and how jealous) I was when I recently stumbled upon the Canwest Canspell National Spelling Bee on television and found grade-eight spelling whizzes rhyming off words like bibelot (huh?) and desquamate (huh?). You have no idea how blown away I was when Emma Brownlie of Ottawa coolly spelled hamadryad (a dry ham sandwich that would benefit from the addition of mustard?) to win the competition and pocket a $15,000 RESP.

I mean, this is the generation for whom spelling is supposedly a lost art. This is the generation we hear (and fear) is being done in by the invention of the spell check and by the proliferation of text messaging -- it's estimated that some five-billions text messages are sent around the world each day -- wherein kids Emma's age ignore conventional spelling in favor of creative spelling, odd abbreviations and their own personal shorthand.

OMG. ROFLMAO.

Yet, according to Eric Paulson, associate professor of literary education at the University of Cincinnati: "We often don't give kids enough credit with their control over language." He says kids are often (and easily) able to shift from short-formed texting to writing well thought-out essays "without getting discombobulated." Now, I have no idea what this means, and I certainly don't know how to spell that big word, but as you can imagine, I've always wanted to use 'discombobulated' in a column.

By writing every day for the past 100 years (or so it sometimes seems), I've been able to upgrade my spelling skills (although, admittedly, not to young Emma's level). Still, when my kids come to me with spelling questions, I feel the rising angst of ortographobia (fear of making spelling mistakes).

"Dad, how do you spell segue?"

"Well, hon, I spell it s-a-g-w-a-y, which is why it might be wise if we just looked it up in the dictionary to see the correct spelling."

Andy Juniper can be visited at his Web site, www.strangledeggs.com, or contacted at ajuniper@strangledeggs.com.