the "f" word

i pride myself on being a good speller. i have been known to be a walking spell checker. when i am handed a flyer, a menu, an invitation, a brochure, an article, a book, a playbill or anything else of the sort, i usually browse over it and find misprints, misspellings and grammatical errors. it's kind of annoying, actually. i don't mean to do it, they just pop out at me and wave ugly red flags and scream "look at me, i'm spelled incorrectly on a mass produced item, printed in permanent ink and you can't do anything about it!" i know, it's sad, but i can't help it. i often receive random phone calls from people asking me "how do you spell...?" i don't mind it at all, in fact, i appreciate someone who relies on any sort of spell checking system, rather than hastily jumping in and delivering a poor spelling attempt of a word. i even bother myself when i re-read my blog and find a misprint or grammatical error. every time i publish a post, it is proofread at least twice. even still, every once in a while an error slips in, and if i find it later, i will go back, correct it and then re-publish. i always look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary and always ask people the spelling of new or unfamiliar words that they have introduced me to. i need to know how to spell them before i can truly understand the meaning of the word. i'll be the first to admit that i'm a little over obsessive when it comes to spelling.

having said that...

the other night, i was out with my friends and we walked by a salon called fuchsia something. i looked at the word and thought that it looked funny. was that really the correct spelling? wasn't it supposed to be spelled fuschia? spelling it like fuchsia makes me want to pronounce it in a way that would probably offend many people. now any normal person would've probably left it at that, but being the obsessive compulsive speller that i am, the moment i got home i went straight to the computer and began a thorough investigation of the word. i was utterly shocked to find out that I was wrong! the correct spelling of the word is fuchsia, deriving from leonhart fuchs who discovered the flower. however, i was pleased to find out that it is spelled incorrectly so frequently, that on dictionary.com fuschia actually comes up as an accepted spelling of the word. not in good ol' webster's though... webster would never give in to such a thing as this!

my realization slightly horrified me when i remembered that plastered all over my baby ava designs website (well, maybe not all over, but in 4 places) was the incorrect spelling of the word fuchsia (fuschia). i was my own worst nightmare, misspelling the same word over and over again on the world wide web! i began to get dizzy as all the fuschias began pointing at me mockingly and wickedly laughing at me. i got right to work and began to make corrections on the labeled products, when suddenly it occurred to me that the items labeled fuchsia, might not even be fuchsia. fuchsia is more of a purplish reddish color and the items were more of a... well... i wasn't sure what to call them. magenta? no... that has the same purplish hue that isn't present in my items. hot pink? no... in my mind when i think hot pink, i picture either 80's neon pink or a shocking electric pink. so what color are these items?

would you say either of these were fuchsia? the bow seems more fuchsia to me than the changing pad and wipey case, but now, i don't know, i've been studying them too long. are they fuchsia or are they something else? i need help fast before those fuschias on my site haunt me any longer... help!!!