Here is one your spell checker won't catch!

Many of us no longer worry much about spelling because we know we can run a spell checker and catch most things. However, we still must be careful that our misspelling does not turn out to be another correctly spelled word. If it does, spell checker will not know the difference.

I enjoy reading the Wedding feature in The Birmingham News on Sundays. It's fun to see how couples met and planned their lives together. Here is a sentence from the one last week, in which the bride describes what she thought the first time she met her husband-to-be in a desktop publishing class:

He's very charming. He's a gentlemen."

I'm sure the reporter who wrote this wedding column knows the difference between GENTLEMAN and GENTLEMEN and simply made a typing error. However, if she ran spell check, she didn't catch the error because GENTLEMEN is also a word.

Since we are talking about one "he" in this sentence, it should read as follows:

He's very charming. He's a gentleman.

I do hope they live happily ever after!