If someone sat me down at a desk, with nothing but a pencil and paper, no computer, no spellcheck, no dictionary and held a gun to my head and told me that I had five minutes to write down the following words, spelled correctly or they would shoot me, I would probably not make it out of the room alive. And the words are, at least the short list is:

bureaucracy

squirrel

lieutenant

fluorescent

hemorrhage

unnecessary

reminiscence

There are others, but I’m going with these, in the interest of brevity.

And, for bonus points, which, by the way, I have no authority whatsoever to dole out, why the hell is “bureaucracy” not on a single list of “commonly misspelled” words that I can find? I can’t be the only English speaker in the world that has trouble with this one.