British academic acts to decriminalize bad spelling

[Dennis Baron]

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British academic acts to decriminalize bad spelling

Students at one British university may soon be told that spelling  
doesn’t count. Writing in the well-respected Times Higher Education  
Supplement, Ken Smith, a criminologist at Buckinghamshire New  
University, wants to turn spelling errors from misdemeanors into civic  
virtues.

If Smith gets his way, instructors at Bucks will stop punishing  
students who use “variants” likearguement, Febuary, truely and  
occured. After all, Smith claims, thier meaning is absolutely clear  
(perhaps he means, ‘there meaning is clere’?).

Smith teaches a large introductory course in criminology, and year  
after year he’s had to cope with the worst in human orthographic  
behavior. Now, instead of waterboarding students for every mistake, he  
wants to devote his time to helping students deal with real crimes,  
like murder, identity theft, insider trading, and the split infinitive.

Critics have complained about the irregularities of English spelling  
since the Middle Ages, when few went to school, spelling was  
relatively lawless, and the monk Orm proposed a system where single  
and double consonants indicated vowel length. His suggestions were  
soundly ignored by the few other monks who knew how to write.

By the 19th century, speakers of English had become aware of the  
troubling discontinuity between written words, whose spelling had by  
then been standardized, and their pronunciation, which remained in flux.

George Bernard Shaw was one of many reformers who sought to replace  
the rigid but illogical spelling system in which fish could be written  
ghoti – gh as in laugh; o as in women; and ti as innation – with a  
phonetic system in which each sound had one letter to represent it,  
and each letter symbolized but a single sound.

Mark Twain was another spelling reformer, though he favored simpler  
spellings rather than strictly phonetic ones. Twain insisted that  
using fewer letters would lead to significant reductions in printing  
costs and reduce the time it took children and foreigners to learn to  
read and write English. Andrew Carnegie, for whom time was money,  
underwrote the Simplified Spelling Board in 1906 to the tune of  
$250,000, close to $6 million in today’s dollars.

Despite the outpouring of cash, simplified spelling was no more  
successful in the 20th century than it had been in the 12th. ....

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____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

http://illinois.edu/goto/debaron

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