Following last week's item concerning "wobbly spelling", I would like to thank an Australian reader for sharing his experiences when he was the sick leave clerk at a large railway workshop. He received all sorts of weird and wonderful spellings of illnesses from employees.
Unsurprisingly, influenza, or flu, was a common complaint but the workers struggled with the spelling of the abbreviated form. Among the offerings he received from sick employees was floo, flew, flue and flow.
Another regular complaint came from workers suffering from diarrhoea, which we noted last week can provide quite a challenge spelling-wise. The sick leave clerk received so many wobbly variations of the word that he gave up trying to correct them and let everything through. His favourite came from a fellow who claimed he was suffering from "die rear", which actually is not such a bad description of this distressing ailment.
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