•December 13, 2023•

I know that all of us have done or said something that continues to embarrass us decades later.

I can safely say this, because no one younger than a couple decades old regularly reads this column. Hey, they don’t know what they’re missing.

I remember misspelling “cauldron” in a spelling bee. Yes, “cauldron.” This must have been in the 1990s, before I adopted this persona.

A “chaldron” — the spelling I offered — in days when coal was the gold standard for clean power, was a measure of it.

I was dinged because that spelling had long gone by the boards even in the 1990s. I must have read the old spelling in a Charles Dickens novel and it lodged in my hippocampus.

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