Whoa? Woah? Woa?
Keanu Reeves has been experiencing a resurgence in the public consciousness lately. From John Wick to Always Be My Maybe and even Toy Story 4, it seems his agent has been hard at work.
He even appeared on the E3 stage, presenting the latest trailer and the release date for the Cyberpunk 2077 (which I’m definitely getting), creating a new meme in the process.
But before ‘breathtaking’, Keanu’s most memorable quote was another singular, exclamatory word:
Whoa.
… which is what this piece is really about. Not the incomparable Mr. Reeves. (Sorry.)
As you can see, I spell the word like so: ‘whoa’. The first time I read the word, it was spelled like this, and that’s now etched into my mind as the one true and right way to do so.
But today I came across an article that spelled it as ‘woah’. And at the risk of being meta (in a stupid way), my first reaction was: “Whoa. Why do people spell it that way?”
(To be clear: it’s not the first time I’ve seen it spelled ‘woah’. But it WAS the first time I stopped to think about it.)
It just looks… wrong to me. It is, without hyperbole, a crime against nature to spell it that way.
I stopped to consider its pronunciation, broken down into phonetic form – wouldn’t that sound like ‘wo-ah’? Which is so obviously wrong that I don’t even need to point it out, do I?
But then, ‘whoa’ broken down in the same way would be ‘wh-o-aye’, and suddenly: incoming existential crisis.
How SHOULD it be spelled then, to fit its pronunciation? The best I could come up with was ‘whoh’, but thinking and typing that out was so painfully unnatural. Look how they (I) massacred my boy.
My bullshit aside, I think this exercise reminded me that first impressions tend to leave the deepest… impression.
(I write for a living, y’all.)
Another example, and another chance to laugh at me: I must’ve skimmed by really fast when I first read the word ‘abysmal’, because for many years, I thought it was spelled ‘absymal’. I even tried to correct a friend once.
So! While what you see at first might irrevocably colour the way you understand something or someone, sometimes it pays to go back and re-think those opinions.
You never really know something or someone until you give it a few months of active consideration, at least.
… except for words. Just double-check those more than none at all, and you should do better than me.