http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080807/od_nm/britain_spelling_odd_dc LONDON (Reuters) - Embaressed by yor spelling? Never you mind.
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Fed up with his students' complete inability to spell common English correctly, a British academic has suggested it may be time to accept "variant spellings" as legitimate.
Rather than grammarians getting in a huff about "argument" being spelled "arguement" or "opportunity" as "opertunity," why not accept anything that's phonetically (fonetickly anyone?) correct as long as it can be understood?
"Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I've got a better idea," Ken Smith, a criminology lecturer at Bucks New University, wrote in the Times Higher Education Supplement.
"University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell."
To kickstart his proposal, Smith suggested 10 common misspellings that should immediately be accepted into the pantheon of variants, including "ignor," "occured," "thier," "truely," "speach" and "twelth" (it should be "twelfth").
Then of course there are words like "misspelt" (often spelled "mispelt"), not to mention "varient," a commonly used variant of "variant."
And that doesn't even begin to delve into all the problems English people have with words that use the letters "i" and "e" together, like weird, seize, leisure, foreign and neighbor.
The rhyme "i before e except after c" may be on the lips of every schoolchild in Britain, but that doesn't mean they remember the rule by the time they get to university.
Of course, such proposals have been made in the past. The advent of text messaging turned many students into spelling neanderthals as phrases such as "wot r u doin 2nite?" became socially, if not academically, acceptable.
Despite Smith's suggestion, language mavens are unconvinced. John Simpson, the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, says rules are rules and they are there for good reason.
"There are enormous advantages in having a coherent system of spelling," he told the Times newspaper.
"It makes it easier to communicate. Maybe during a learning phase there is some scope for error, but I would hope that by the time people get to university they have learnt to spell."
Yet even some of Britain's greatest wordsmiths have acknowledged it's a language with irritating quirkiness.
Playwright George Bernard Shaw was fond of pointing out that the word "ghoti" could just as well be pronounced "fish" if you followed common pronunciation: 'gh' as in "tough," 'o' as in "women" and 'ti' as in "nation."
And he was a playright.
I think a few hundred years in the future, after Western society has finished it's slow dissent and crashed outright (and hopefully rebounded; and not as a giant Islamic theocracy) I think historians will look back at this train of thought and pin it as a major source of our faggotry.
I've always had a general dislike of America's education system, and the more I hear about what they have going on in western Europe the more I think they're in the same boat as us. Now I've discovered Britain's version of ebonics. Except it isn't for black urban youths who spell phonetically (who exasperate the problem by also pronouncing words incorrectly). No, this time it's for dumbass white kids.
Well, I guess if black kids in California get a shot at making it happen then so should whitey over there in the UK. I suppose you could call it equality in action.
I want to stress one statement in the article though.
"University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell."
Yeah, that's right. We're not talking about elementary, middle, or high school (or whatever you guys have on the other side of the ocean). No, we're talking about fucking college.
On an unrelated note. Our future historians will also contribute to mathematics in the form of a simple equation.
T + B + P = KFC
For a pictorial example, please see here:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v146/nates1984/bricks-equal-kfc.jpgThe more we dumb down society, the more crap like that will happen. Of course, this faggotry this will continue. We'll lower the passing grade more and more and give people who assault police chicken for one simple reason.
The bleeding heart liberals tell us we might hurt their wittle feelings.
Ultimately, I think that's what this education bullshit is all about. I say bring back red ink and dodge ball. If they spell a word wrong write a giant red X on their paper and use a large black marker to write "You fucking fail!" It'd have to be all big like though, you can't pussify that shit and retain the intended effect.
Interestingly enough, that article was just the site I wished to dump that rant. The real source can be found here.
http://www.cracked.com/article_15231_7-reasons-21st-century-making-you-miserable.html#5. We don't get criticized enough.
Most of what sucks about not having close friends isn't the missed birthday parties or the sad, single-player games of ping pong with the wall. No, what sucks is the lack of real criticism.
In my time online I've been called "fag" approximately 104,165 times. I keep an Excel spreadsheet. I've also been called "asshole" and "cockweasel" and "fuckcamel" and "cuntwaffle" and "shitglutton" and "porksword" and "wangbasket" and "shitwhistle" and "thundercunt" and "fartminge" and "shitflannel" and "knobgoblin" and "boring."
And none of it mattered, because none of those people knew me well enough to really hit the target. I've been insulted lots, but I've been criticized very little. And don't ever confuse the two. An insult is just someone who hates you making a noise to indicate their hatred. A barking dog. Criticism is someone trying to help you, by telling you something about yourself that you were a little too comfortable not knowing.
~~Imagine picture of giant transvestite here~~
Above: A flamboyant transvestite with about
five times as many friends as the average person
Tragically, there are now a whole lot of people who never have those conversations. The interventions, the brutal honesty, the, "you know, everybody's pissed off because of what you said last night, but nobody wants to say anything because they're afraid of you," sort of conversations. Those horrible, awkward, wrenchingly uncomfortable sessions that you can only have with someone who sees right to the center of you.
E-mail and texting are awesome tools for avoiding that level of honesty. With text, you can respond when you feel like it. You can measure your words. You can pick and choose which questions to answer. The person on the other end can't see your face, can't see you get nervous, can't detect when you're lying. You have almost total control and as a result that other person never sees past your armor, never sees you at your worst, never knows the embarrassing little things about yourself that you can't control. Gone are the common quirks, humiliations and vulnerabilities that real friendships are built on.
Browse around people's MySpace pages, look at the characters they create for themselves. If you've built a pool of friends via a blog, building yourself up as a misunderstood, mysterious Master of the Night, it's kind of hard to log on and talk about how you went to prom and got diarrhea out on the dance floor. You never get to really be yourself, and that's a very lonely feeling.
And, on top of all that ...
This is all very related.
Welcome to western society. Enjoy your miserable life, but at least you can say it "sux" on your college paper and not get a point taken away for spelling. At least in Britain.
