After finishing the translation of "O Tupi na Geografia Nacional" (The Tupi in the National Geography, as I translated), I was looking for another book to read and translate. I thought of translating Dr. Castro Lopes's "Neologismos Indispensáveis e Barbarismos Dispensáveis" (Indispensable Neologisms and Dispensable Barbarisms), another Brasilian book. But I stumbled upon a curious work.
Written in 1802 by "Lord" Timothy Dexter, an American businessman, it is supposed to be an autobiography, but his lack of literacy and poor penmanship has yielded a relentless block of misspelled words, with no punctuation nor structure. It is a hard read, and even after decoding it, it's not anything groundbreaking.
However, I see the vision in this book. Even such books are an expression of their self, and in this specific case, the misspellings contained in the book hint how Timothy Dexter would have pronounced those words. This is valuable to people who study accents and dialects.
For now I'm just cleaning up the OCR output found in archive.org, fixing the inaccuracies before starting on the text correction and an eventual translation into Brasilian Portuguese.