British academic acts to decriminalize bad spelling

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Aug 7, 2008, at 11:24 PM, Dennis Baron wrote:

> ... 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.

this doesn't actually credit Shaw with the "ghoti" spelling, and
that's a good thing; see Ben Zimmer's "Ghoti before Shaw':

   http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=81

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