I’ve always taken an inordinate amount of pride in my spelling. I not only remember winning the junior-high spelling bee at my small Catholic school, but I clearly recall walking down to the Herald & News in Klamath Falls, Ore., to have my picture taken for the accompanying blurb. Perhaps that’s why I’m finding it particularly bothersome that my spelling is starting to slip.

At some point in the last two years, I’ve come to believe that desperate is spelled with two a’s much like separate. I type out accommodation and am not quite sure if the word does in fact have two c’s AND two m’s. Most troubling, while proofreading something I recently wrote, I discovered the phrase “their having a good time.”

It’s tempting to dismiss them as typos as if it were a matter of digital dexterity. I slipped on the keyboard, but I know that’s not the case. They are (very small) cognitive  errors in elements of language I used to have down cold.

So, I did what any modern individual does when facing a question of health: I checked the internet, and Google has informed me that a (slight) decline in spelling accuracy should not be considered surprising. I turn 50 later this year, and a growing number of studies have shown an age-related decline in spelling, especially in a language like English with all its funky rules and exceptions.

In other words, I shouldn’t be worried about a subtle wavering in my spelling acumen, and yet this has hit home much harder than when I had to start wearing bifocals six years ago or when — back in my 30s — a hairstylist in Belltown asked if I wanted to start dying my grays. (I considered it for exactly 1.6 seconds before declining.)

I’m just not interested in hiding evidence of my age. The spelling has me worried, though.

Now I don’t want to make too big a deal about this. I’ve never been THAT great of a speller. After advancing to the county spelling bee back in Oregon, I got bounced in the second round.

I was asked to spell lynx, and I offered up an “i” where the “y” should have been — without even considering the fact that I could have gone with L-I-N-K-S and made it easy on myself.

There have always been words that I’ve struggled with, too. Guard never, ever looks right to me the first time, though I’ve always been able to figure it out because “gaurd” looks even worse.

When I was in 10th grade, I had an English teacher named Mrs. Spidell, who told us after she’d suffered a stroke a few years back there were some words that would simply vanish from her mind, and she couldn’t recall them no matter how hard she tried.

“Like refrigerator,” she said.

This struck one of my classmates as ridiculous.

“If you can’t remember it,” Kevin Wong wondered, “how were you just able to say it?”

I’ve got to say that Kevin had a point, but I do worry about this erosion of language, whether it’s gradual or sudden. I’ve always loved words, and I’ve worked hard to learn how to use them to express myself both professionally and personally. It scares me to think that I might have peaked because I’ve seen how hard that is for many people.

In fact, there are some tech dorks who’ve promoted the idea that it’s a good thing we’re outsourcing things like spelling, grammar, and even memory to online tools. Why waste our brain space on things that a machine can do? Just ask Alexa. Or Siri.

As a sports journalist, I spent more than 20 years talking to and writing about professional athletes, and while they have the luxury of incredibly lucrative contracts, one of the biggest challenges is that every one of them knows that they’ll hit their physical peak in their late 20s, and any dollar they earn beyond the age of 31 or 32 has to be considered found money. Sports is absolutely a young man’s game.

Writing may not have brought in nearly as much money, but I did have longevity on my side. I could reasonably expect to earn more money in my 50s than I did in my 20s, and while I don’t think that I was wrong about that, I do wonder if I’ve overestimated my staying power.

I have been incredibly fortunate, with each decade of my life being better than the previous one, but at some point that’s probably going to stop being the case.

But maybe I don’t really need to be a good speller anymore. Every word processor now includes a spellcheck, which isn’t even a program you run so much as a constant presence, monitoring each word that is typed out and placing a red, squiggly line beneath the ones it doesn’t recognize.

In fact, there are some tech dorks who’ve promoted the idea that it’s a good thing we’re outsourcing things like spelling, grammar, and even memory to on-line tools. Why waste our brain space on things that a machine can do? Just ask Alexa. Or Siri. As Clive Thompson once wrote in Wired, “The perfect recall of silicon memory can be an enormous boon for thinking.” This was back in 2007. “I feel much smarter when I’m using the internet as a mental plug-in during my daily chit-chat.”

Well, that sounds like someone who has never experienced the massive ego boost that comes from making a run in bar trivia, which is the closest thing I’ve experienced to being a god. Well, other than winning the junior high spelling bee.

But as someone who is old enough to remember the world before the internet, I simply cannot abide minimizing the importance of our own memory.

Besides, I’ve now seen how these things work in the real world, and as someone who installed Grammarly on my computer and now has no idea how to remove it, I can tell you that it constantly urges me to erase any fun I’ve managed to write into a sentence. Sure, it occasionally points out when my subject and verb don’t agree, but that benefit is outweighed by the difficulty I have in dismissing its intrusive pop-up suggestions. I really do need to figure out how to get rid of the thing.

Now, if you have not enjoyed this column, you might be inclined to suggest I heed more of Grammarly’s advice. If you did, well, I’ll take that as a sign that I have at least a few more years before my work can be outsourced to an algorithm. As for the accuracy of my spelling, well, I turned the spell checker off when I typed his column, so you can judge for yourself how I did.

Editor’s note: Several misspellings and a few grammatical errors have been corrected. Really.