More From The Spelling Nazi
And once again I say “leave our language alone!”
El Reg reports that “Academic wants to ‘free up’ English spelling”:
John Wells, Emeritus Professor of Phonetics at University College London, is proposing English adopts a phonetic approach to spelling in order to relieve kids of the “burden” of learning to write our beloved mother tongue as God intended.
If you wanted to relieve them of the burden, then we might as well make German our first language and re-train the 60 odd million people. Oh, hang on - we won the war to protect our country and funnily enough our language amongst all other things British.
The article gives some examples:
Wells reckons, for example, that “give” would better be rendered as “giv”, “river” should become “rivver” and, ahem, that Blighty should reorgani
sze certain spellings in line with US usage.
Americanisze? Sod Off! The Americans have inflicted us with “dude” and similar, re-defined “gay” and “fag” to refer to homosexuality. To me cars will always have a bonnet, bumper and boot, not a hood or a fender.
It seems I’m not alone either. Reading the comments (admittedly only the first few so far) my feelings are replicated, albeit at a somewhat harsher level:
What an utter, utter cock. Can there be any method more sleazy for an allegedly educated person to generate some cheap publicity for himself than this bucket of fetid dog crap? While we’re at it, perhaps we should just scrap schools and merely teach kids how to smash their skulls into a big iron spike. That’s about as intelligent as this rotting turd of an idea. Fucking moron.
Children have been learning to spell their contemporary English words correctly for centuries, why are modern kids so incapable of doing the same? I couldn’t think of anything worse than allowing “txt spk” into the modern lexicon
There’s a total of 73 comments at the time of writing, making for some interesting responses.
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