Teh-My Arch Enemy!

When I was a kid I got a Commode 16 computer that had one game I remember in particular. A text-based pirate adventure game that it seems was called: Pirate Adventure. This was (as I remember it) a black screen with white text and you would type two word commands: Look Left, Open Treasure, and the like.

Excursus: Now this was originally in my mind the post that would be written and would have appeared last Friday on this blog. However, I started to find a cool weblink to the Commodore 16 and to see if I could find something out about the pirate game I remembered. This led to an array of websites devoted to kids games from the 70s and 80s, which got me to remembering this owl calculator thing that I had. Now this wasn't the red-eyed light up thing or the Little Professor from Texas Instruments.

I'm almost positive it was basically the Little Professor but it was an owl and it had a mortarboard hat and it was Texas Instruments and it had the cool handle hanging off the side and everything. So I looked for that owl on a ton of sites and went from one toy site to another and collector sites and eBay and on and on and on. I did this until I was a bit ashamed of how much time I wasted on this stuff that was only supposed to be a link in a blog post that most likely no one would ever even click.

Plus I got sort of down on the whole 70s/80s generation as I saw how many of these "grownups" were laying out serious cash for toys from their childhood. These are people who, when their Farmville isn't sucking up all their time, are trying to track down an Intellivsion or a ColecoVision or a Merlin or something. Lame. And don't even get me started on Atari and on the whole episode of our family saving for the Pac-Man game when it first came out for $30 or so and how it was just about the biggest disappointment of my childhood. It breaks my heart...

Anyway, that went on so long I got sort of down on me and my fellow Gen Xers. So I just went to bed, the post just left there to roll around in my brain. And it was especially bad since the post really isn't about the pirate game ... its about TEH! End of Excursus.

So I had this game and I would spend my time saying: Read Map, Ask Parrot, Say Yoho! Well, believe it or not typing even those short words made me an incredible typist. By "incredible" I mean that I can type fairly fast with three fingers: my two index fingers and the middle finger of my right hand. I tried to break this bad habit in high school when I took typing for a while (the class being was also full of girls) but it didn't work out, so I had to drop the class.

One habit I somehow picked up in all this fast finger-pecking was a problem with the word the, which is always spelled teh. Always. Wheteher it appears in teh word otehr or in anotehr, I get it wrong every time. Back when I was using Microsoft Word and Outlook a lot, I just had teh auto-correct feature take care of it. Nowadays, I don't type a lot of documents but I do send a lot of emails and do a fair bit of this type of thing.

What I don't use now is the auto-correct feature. So I spend a lot of time going back through all my stuff and change all my teh to the. On and on I change things. I use teh find and replace feature and I generally growl teh whole time about my inability to type teh easiest of words! That is why I decided that teh was my arch enemy. Teh big thing that wasted all my valuable internet surfing time.

But you know what I found out? I'm not alone! The kids these days are using teh word "teh" to emphasize in the way we older folks used to use italics. So now if you are cool enough to be in a chat room (as opposed to say, feeding your sheep in Farmville, or is it on Farmville) you can say teh when what you really mean is the. Pretty awesome, right? Kids these days. Who knew I was so with it?