The Love Letters Are Misspelt. Do Not Correct Them.

I am the sort of parent who corrects menus. Not out loud; I am not a monster. I just look at “expresso” for slightly too long, and my husband says my name in a low voice.

So I read with alarm about the Lenços dos Namorados.

These are the sweetheart handkerchiefs of the Minho in northern Portugal. A young woman would embroider one for the man she hoped to marry: hearts, birds, flowers and a few lines of verse. And the verse, in the older handkerchiefs, is spelt the way it was spoken, by women who had often had very little schooling and stitched the words as they heard them.

The spelling is not a mistake. The spelling is the tradition. You may not correct it.

There is a museum in Portugal where my red pen would be confiscated at the door.

In Vila Nova de Cerveira, on the Minho itself, eighth-year pupils at the local school took on the lenços, and a team of them wrote it up as a piece of reporting that won a prize in a Público school journalism contest. That is more research than I have ever done on a menu.

At this point I am revising my position, and not willingly.

Every one of those handkerchiefs was written by someone who wanted to say one thing, clearly, to one person. Nobody stitched a verse onto linen for a spelling examiner. The man receiving it was not going to send it back with a note in the margin. If he did, I hope he stayed single.

I tested this at home. The youngest wrote a birthday card for her father. It read: HAPY BIRTHDAY DADY YOU ARE THE BEST DADY IN BELJUM.

Twenty years of correcting things moved my hand towards a pencil. The youngest saw it move, and held the card against her chest the way you would hold a kitten away from a dog.

My husband received the card at breakfast. He read it twice, put it on the mantelpiece and said it was the best card he had ever been given, in any spelling, in any country, including Beljum.

It is still on the mantelpiece. I walk past it several times a day. It has three mistakes, four if you count the country, and I have been told that if I touch it I will be staying single too.