Can You Spell . . . ? 1.1

Teachers — Wouldn’t it be nice if . . . . . . once a week you could type ten or twenty spelling words into a SimpleText or WordPad document and your students could study those same words by solving a crossword puzzle?. . . . . And wouldn’t it be great if they also could play a wordsearch game with those same words? . . . . . . . Wouldn’t it be neat if you could print out those games on paper? . . . . . . And wouldn’t it be cool if your students could play a ‘hangman’ type game with those same words?

And wouldn’t it be totally awesome if teachers used proper punctuation instead of trying to liven up their sluggish streams of gabble with periodic eruptions of feral ellipses? Even the name of this app is a glaring example of the kind of hyper-punctuation that runs rampant wherever its predators are suppressed, leading to an epidemic of chronic wasting disease and liver fluke as nature seeks to maintain a delicate balance in the life-or-death struggle for survival.

The developer of Can You — no, no, we can’t say it. Ahem. Okay. This syntactically challenged developer is the artist formerly known as codeJesus Software, now reinvented as Quizville Software (“Quizville: The Capital of Learning”) and perhaps edging nervously away from the codeJesus fundie who created The Book of John. Or perhaps not. The alert reader (you know who you are) will notice a marked resemblance between the word puzzles of The Book of John and the word puzzles of Can You Sp — please don’t make us say it.

At first we briefly considered downloading the full 4.7 MB version of this alarmingly bloated app, but such a foolhardy move was ruled to be an unacceptable national security risk. Luckily for our readers, who desperately need to know which inept educational software is most likely to convince their innocent young whippersnappers to become devil worshipers, we located a slimmer demo version and, boy, are we sorry now.

Within seconds of opening this Pandora’s Box of word puzzle insanity, our tiny quivering paws were scrabbling frantically at our own bloody eyeballs in a mad bid to escape the horror. Our screen was brutally violated by wildly blinking words, the volume turned itself to the little-known “pierce eardrums with ice pick” setting, and the menu bar flashed uncontrollably in an exciting game of seizure-inducing peekaboo. We’d rather spend our $2 shareware fee on a nice tall glass of ferret drippings.

Quizville Software, we would castigate you soundly with a ceremonial whip woven from the armpit hair of unrepentant feminists, but our fervor is dampened by the perfection with which you have ridiculed yourself. Your motto — “It’s not about Teaching, Silly! It’s about Learning.” — says it all, more eloquently than we ever could. Take this giant inflatable 10.9 to cherish always, and think of the children.

Download Can You Spell . . . ?