British academic acts to decriminalize bad spelling

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Aug 8, 2008, at 6:42 AM, i wrote:

> 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


citing Matthew Gordon's research, first reported here on ADS-L.

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