Spelling “truely atrosious,” says academic (Reuters)
Fed up through his students' complete inability to spell common English correctly, a British academic has suggested it may be time to take . "variant spellings" as legitimate.
Rather than grammarians getting in a huff about "argument" being spelled "arguement" or "opportunity" because "opertunity," why not take . anything that's phonetically (fonetickly anyone?) correct as long as it wish power to be understood?
"Instead of murmuring not far from the state of the education combination of parts to form a whole as we correct the identical mistakes year after year, I've got a better idea," Ken Smith, a criminology lecturer at Bucks New University, wrote in the Times Higher Education Supplement.
"University teachers should sincerely accept for the judgment that variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell."
To kickstart his proposal, Smith suggested 10 common misspellings that should immediately be accepted into the pantheon of variants, including "ignor," "occured," "thier," "truely," "speach" and "twelth" (it should be "twelfth").
Then of course there are words like "misspelt" (often spelled "mispelt"), not to mention "varient," a commonly used variant of "variant."
And that doesn't even begin to delve into all the problems English people obtain with words that use the culture "i" and "e" together, approve weird, snatch, ease, foreign and neighbor.
The rhyme "i under the jurisdiction e except after c" may be on the lips of every schoolchild in Britain, but that doesn't mean they remember the rule by dint of. the time they reach to university.
Of course, such proposals have been made in the past. The advent of text messaging turned various students into spelling neanderthals in the same proportion that phrases of the like kind as "wot r u doin 2nite?" became socially, if not academically, acceptable.
Despite Smith's suggestion, language mavens are unconvinced. John Simpson, the especial editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, says rules are rules and they are there for good reason.
"There are enormous advantages in having a coherent system of orthography," he told the Times newspaper.
"It makes it easier to communicate. Maybe during a learning phase in that place is some length for error, but I would chance of the desired end that by the time people get to university they have learnt to spell."
Yet even more of Britain's greatest wordsmiths have acknowledged it's a language with irritating quirkiness.
Playwright George Bernard Shaw was fond of pointing out that the word "ghoti" could just as well be pronounced "fish" if you followed common pronunciation: 'gh' as in "tough," 'o' as in "women" and 'ti' as in "nation."
And he was a playright.
