Trial #9 {Challenge Accepted}

Day 15

Characterize the second-last app on your phone or the last website you've visited (before this one). Send this new character to the supermarket.

I apologize in advance.

***

Ginger was at the last place she wanted to be right now- the supermarket.

The only place other than the library with over a million words lying scattered all around the place. Printed onto various types of products like cereals, juice boxes, electronics, dress tags and the like, Ginger knew that the number of words printed on each product could roughly amount to a single Mills&Boons book from the 90s. Meaning that one supermarket could have an equivalent of 18,000 books. Not very different from a library.

At least, that's what she told herself to calm down.

The plethora of words seemed to do nothing to appease herself, however. How could she, when about 50% of those words were commonly misspelled by the ignorant Americans she was surrounded by?

How many times had she tried to correct the spelling of ‘Fetuccine’ to ‘Fettuccine’, writing to famous manufacturers of the food item on how it had an extra ‘T’ owing to its Italian origin? Not to mention the countless shop assistants she had to pester asking them to change up the spelling on their price tag.

In her eyes, misspelling a word was a cardinal sin, one that should be corrected as much as possible, for otherwise, the next generation might grow up learning those same misspelled words.

Pushing these troubling thoughts to the back of her head, she pushed her shopping cart forward looking for some Barbecue sauce.

She stopped short when she found it. On the glass bottle was written,”Barbeque sauce".

Barbecue sauce. B-A-R-B-E-C-U-E. That was the correct spelling, according to Oxford, Cambridge, and every other dictionary out there. And yet, some faulty degree holder, sitting in some old factory, had decided that the name was Barbeque sauce, just because its abbreviated form was called BBQ. That was what ran through Ginger’s mind, as she shooted lasers at the bottle. She found it ignorant and downright repulsive. And hence, she put it back on the shelf and started searching for another bottle down the aisle. If she was going to be an advocate against such a noble and required cause, she was also going to have to boycott things which stood against her way of thinking.

“Hey, Ginger!” a voice called out from behind Ginger just as she was turning her cart to the next aisle. She turned back to see Greta Higgins running towards her.

At that moment, Greta was the last person she wanted to see. Greta and her used to study at the same high school, and throughout the time that Ginger had known her, she was the “social media queen", as everyone called her.

Ginger had been witness to most of her posts on Twitter, unfortunately, she also had witnessed most of her grammatical errors in those posts. One time, she had written ‘your’ in a sentence where it was supposed to be ‘you’re’. Oh, the horrors she had that day.

“Hello,” she let out half-heartedly as she saw her.

“Hey girl! How you doing?” Greta asked her.

“Um, actually, it's how are you doing, Greta,” she told her.

“Yeah, whatevs. It's been so long, what are you doing now?” she asked her.

Ginger’s body trembled with anger. She couldn't take it anymore…

“I QUIT!” She yelled to Greta and ran away from the supermarket, leaving her cart full of correctly spelled products.   

***

Day 15 marks one of the weirdest prompts I've ever written in prompt history.

I'm sorry, Zainab, you told me not to hurry, but I got paranoid with each minute and had to hurry it up. Hence the weird ending.

God, I had so much planned. Unfortunately, someone up there won't allow me to have the time to finish this up as I'd have liked, so here we are.

The second last app I chose is Ginger Keyboard, which is a keyboard I had recently installed on my phone, because this device's aurocorrect was getting on my nerves too much. Unfortunately, Ginger stops giving suggestions once she sees that I'm typing up a big word, or an incorrect spelling on purpose, just like the Ginger in the story.

It allows me to send gifs rhough, so I'm happy.

Until tomorrow,
Deena.

P.S. I suck at grammar. So I deserve some applause in making this as much as typo/grammar error less as possible. 😂