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If you stick around long enough, we’ll lay out all our sins. We certainly have enough server space. Today, we recount the great homophone and homonym incident (there is a difference, and we violated both in an ugly manner). A year or so back, we began mixing up our words (in writing — we can’t speak worth a damn). Witch. Which. It’s. Its. Even, we are shamed to say, stationery and stationary. It got to the point where our husband (who sees good spelling as a nuisance — that’s what we’re paid for) was catching our errors. Well-meaning but clueless friends said (in their “you have serious problems and we are backing away slowly” voices), “Just use spell check.”

Spell check. Ha! Our words were spelled just fine, thank you very much. We are the type of person who disdains spell check (we are also the type of person who sometimes types very quickly and neglects to reread things, but that’s a personal problem, not a spelling issue). It got to the point where we second-guessed even the most casual email. We were afraid to leave the house, so to speak.

As with all stories, ours has a happy ending. We cured ourselves by writing an essay. Yes, we sat our butt down and wrote until our problem was solved. Since then, we have toed the line without a second thought. Mostly. We thank Maud Newton for bringing these articles to our attention, and hope her defusing works as planned. We don’t want her to blow up.

• Maybe I’ll try to defuse, rather than diffuse, my hair; with this humidity, anything’s worth a shot
• Where to stick grocer’s apostrophe
• Homophone horrors