two c's, one n.

Every night, at around 5:15, Harry, the head chef, comes out to the bar, sits down, and writes out the specials of the evening. Sometimes he writes them out in bulleted form (which I prefer) and sometimes in a paragraph (which I dislike). Sometimes he writes one special with bullets and one in a paragraph, which is just inconsistent and really bugs me.

But this entry is not about inconsistency in food descriptions and my anal-retentiveness about it. This entry is about my anal-retentiveness about spelling.

Tonight we had a sea bass special. Among other things, it was served with zucchini ratatouille. Or, as it was noted on the specials sheet, "zuchinni ratatouille."

I always copy down the specials onto a little sheet of paper that I keep with me for reference. When I got to the bullet with the ratatouille, I paused. Though I wasn't really sure how to spell zucchini, I know that the way Harry had it was not right. Suddenly, I realized why most of the time, Harry just wrote "zukes."

Here's the dilemma. It has taken most of my nearly 22 years, but I have figured out that correcting spelling errors when unasked is a really obnoxious habit. But, oh, it bothered me. It bothered me that I didn't even know the correct spelling, and also that it was wrong on the specials sheet. I want to be able to say that I work at a place where not only is the food good, but we can spell it right, too.

Harry had to go into the back for some reason or another, so I took the opportunity to run behind the bar and grab a cookbook. Surely there would be a reference to zucchini in the index, and surely the editors of the cookbook would have bothered to spell it correctly. So it was from the soup cookbook that I learned that "zucchini" has two C's and one N.

So I sat back down and patiently waited for Harry to come back and finish writing out the specials (hopefully in bulleted form). When he did, I timidly asked, "So, would you like to know the correct spelling of zucchini?"

Thank goodness, he laughed. Of all the possible reactions he could have had, that was the one I hoped for, though I would certainly have understood reactions such as scowling, kicking me, or poking me in the eye with any convenient sharp object. And then he carefully wrote out the correct spelling of zucchini as I spelled it out for him. I also confessed to him that I had to look it up, in an effort to make myself seem less obnoxious.

Then he remarked that he knew that "ratatouille" was right, and I had to agree. Because somehow even though neither of us could spell "zucchini" and even though I'm not entirely sure what ratatouille is, we can both spell it.