I’m using a different format for today’s Instant Quiz: A headline from a 3/22/15 New York Times Magazine article about Ben Carson. Your job is to find the mistake.

Did you notice that minuscule is misspelled? And are you as shocked as I was? This is The New York Times Magazine, for heaven’s sake! Theodore Bernstein (a famed NYT copyeditor who wrote some marvelous books about writing) would have fainted.

How could this happen? My suspicion is that the New York Times is saving money by cutting back on its editing staff. I would also guess (although I can’t be sure) that the person who did the headline was chided afterwards for not using a spellchecker. Surely many readers pointed out the misspelling.

Spelling and spellcheckers have been on my mind lately, and that’s unusual for me. I’m a natural-born good speller (nothing to be proud of, unfortunately – there’s no correlation to intelligence). The only words I consistently have trouble with are those with double letters. I have to look up Cincinnati every time, for example.

But here’s the point: Even though it’s a nuisance, I continue to look up those words…over and over, again and again. I know my limitations, and I don’t trust my memory.

I had a shock a couple of days ago when I uploaded the Kindle file for my latest book, What Your English Teacher Didn’t Tell You. The website posted a notice that I had 13 spelling errors. Turns out all those errors came from a “Can you spot the  errors?” activity in my book. I was pleased that Kindle allowed the mistakes to stand after I approved them.

This please-use-correct-spellings policy is new to the Kindle website, and I heartily approve. Too many self-published books are rife with errors. I was on another self-publishing website one day and spotted a book with a spelling error in a common word in the title.

But we should remember that this fetish about spelling is relatively new to our language. Spelling used to be highly individualistic; nobody cared much about consistency. Shakespeare famously spelled his own name in various ways over his lifetime.

Back to minuscule (a word that, I confess, I used to misspell myself long ago when there were no computers and no spellcheckers). Here’s how I learned to get it right every time: Think about the word minus.

Some recommendations: Use the spellchecker even if you consider yourself a good speller. (Those little red lines have often saved me from embarrassment.) Be aware that spellcheckers aren’t infallible. If you don’t know how to spell a word, look it up. If you can’t find it in the dictionary, call a library and ask a reference librarian to look it up for you. (That’s what they’re paid to do!)