Just for fun, try reading this quickly:
“I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to a rsceearchr at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a word are. The olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it wouthit a porbelm. And I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt.”
This is part of an e-mail I received from a student in one of my copy editing classes at Centennial College last year. At the time, the exercise of reading this e-mail – in the context of a class to improve grammar, writing style and spelling – seemed hilarious. I have to admit my laughter was restrained. Why? Well, the truth is that all too often I receive e-mails with equally appalling spelling mistakes in them for real. And just because they’re e-mails, somehow I’m supposed to overlook the errors.
Sorry, but I refuse to accept laziness just because cyberspace is a free and unbridled toy. Call me old fashioned, but I think it’s a slippery slope.
I recognize that the English language has its shortcomings. As recently as this week, I was reminded that even George Bernard Shaw loved to take playful pokes at his native tongue. The brilliant Irish playwright, novelist and essayist pointed out, for example, that the word spelled “ghoti” might just as easily be pronounced as “fish.” Employing the idiosyncrasies of English, he pronounced “gh” as in “tough,” “o” as heard in the word “women” and “ti” as it’s understood in our pronunciation of “nation.” But my guess is that even the man who earned both the Nobel prize for literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938) would be spinning in his grave over the latest suggested changes to English.
A criminology lecturer at the university level suggests it’s about time we accept, what he calls “variant spellings” in our daily usage of English. According to the story from the Reuters news agency, Prof. Ken Smith thinks the English-speaking world should accept such errors as: “twelth,” “ignor,” “thier,” “speach” and “truely.” (I’d like to point out that thanks to my computer, I’ve had to go back and un-fix the misspelled words my computer corrected; even new technology doesn’t like misspellings.)
Those are infuriating enough. But then the noted criminologist suggests we give up on misguided spellings of the second month of the year and the third day of the week. Smith says it’s OK with him if we spell them “Febuary” and “Wensday.” I know, I know, Walter Cronkite made it all right to mangle February since he admitted he couldn’t pronounce it on the air the way it was spelled. But I’m also astounded that the criminologist with the “variant spelling” proposal isn’t an American (where they still can’t spell honour or defence). The man teaches at Bucks New University in the U.K.!
“University teachers should simply accept…those words our students most commonly misspell,” Prof. Smith says in the Reuters story.
I can remember my father – born an American, but a Canadian citizen as an adult – correcting my bad grammar in conversation at the dinner table and my misspellings in essays and letters. And when I asked him to tell me the correct spelling, he inevitably told me to look it up in a dictionary. At the time, I couldn’t understand why he was such a taskmaster when it came to correct English.
“How could a little mistake hurt?” I complained.
“Go tell Shakespeare. Or, go tell your first prospective employer,” he would admonish me.
And at the college level, that’s what I try to communicate to my students. If they’re trying to make a positive impression on a prospective employer, the last thing they need is a publisher, editor, producer or even an online boss having to face an e-mail application with these so-called variant spellings.
Which brings me back to the e-mail brainteaser my student provided. It’s back to school time. Allowing such abbreviated, sometimes unintelligible spelling and short-form hybrids into everyday language may be an expression of independence. But if the message gets lost in the medium, what’s the point? I hasten to add that Lynne Truss, bestselling author of “Eats, Shoots and Leaves,” pointed out that the war in South Africa (1899) began as a result of a grammatical mistake in a quickly composed telegram.
While I’m not so naïve to draw a line in the sand on variant spelling, I “truly” believe we shouldn’t “ignore” proper “speech” and spelling.