Mystery solved

Lesson #2 in my Grammar Refresher course had me going on a tangent that answered one of my longstanding questions.

What is the plural of cancel? canceled? or cancelled?

I've seen it both ways, and the answer is.....
Canceled for the American spelling and
Cancelled for the British spelling (that goes along with colour, valour, grey, and theatre.)

That's why I've seen it both ways. Even when I use spell check I get it right both ways. And that's why. Because they're both right.

The rule (for the most part, although cancel doesn't seem to follow this rule) is:

"Double the final consonant before adding an ending that begins with a vowel when the last syllable of the word is accented and that syllable ends in a single vowel followed by a single consonant." Quoted from here. (I'm not linking to my class, since that would probably be illegal somehow. My links are all from other places.)

A couple of examples:
omit - omitted
travel - travelled
open - opened

That explanation helps a lot! I took a spelling quiz and only missed three.
Take this spelling quiz yourself! How did you do?

Okay, that wasn't really the topic of my lesson, but that's all the grammar I'll bore you with today.

Let's talk about knitting.

At this point I went upstairs to get my camera and take pictures of my knitting. Instead, I got two of these and came back downstairs.



Oh, that's right. Now I remember what I went upstairs for...

Knitting. And pictures.



These mittnz were made using the pattern-a-day calendar. They're adult-sized mittens with nice 2x2 cables the whole way around. The yarn is yellow worsted something-or-other. Maybe Lion wool. They're another pair for Mittnz 2008. I'm past 8 pairs, which was my goal.

One final bit of trivia. Did you know that one of the most commonly misspelled words is the word "misspelled"? Rather ironic, huh?