Are there certain words that always … always send you to the dictionary?

I’m not talking about the fifty-cent words that we only use a couple times per year. Checking those just seems like a good idea. Rather, I am talking about everyday words that, for some reason, you can’t farookin’ remember how to spell.

In my case, it doesn’t matter that I’ve been speaking and writing English for a bit more than five decades. There are a few words that invariably require my turning to Mr. Spellchecker, and it annoys the hell out of me. You might ask, “Yo, Jimbo. You should use that Autocorrect feature in Word. It fixes your spelling as you type.” To which I reply that I hesitate to use that nifty feature because I don’t spell these words wrong in a consistent manner. Each time I stumble over one of the dreaded words I take a crack at it, and invariably the Word-produced Red Line of Stupid appears under my incorrect spelling.

Once the spelling is corrected, I invariably promise myself that I will forevermore remember the correct spelling. Of course, I never do.

Casting my embarrassment (ooops!!! That’s one of them — How many r’s? How many s’s?), I hereby share the list that comes right off the top of my head. There are doubtless more:

Banana: It always looks to me as if it needs more n’s.
Commitment: How many m’s? How many t’s? Maybe I should be committed?
Potato: I always secretly felt Dan Quayle’s pain.
Tomato: See above
Jealous: I get as far as the first three letters, then wonder if the a should be an o.
Acknowledgement: It’s the damned second e. In the word “Judgment,” it’s not there! I probably could use Autocorrect on that one.
Rhythm: This one is the granddaddy of the all. I use this word all the damned time, and yet I have never, ever spelled it without checking my spelling, which is most often wrong. The word just looks goofy as hell to me.

I have no idea why I am obviously incapable of learning and remembering the correct spelling of this baloney words. I’ve even tried mnemonic (OK, so I had to check that word too) devices, but I can never remember the mnemonic device I created.

I figure it must be a wiring thing in my cruller.