Truly Atrosious Spelling

I can't believe a criminology lecturer would suggest something like that. Putting aside for the moment what makes him think he's an authority on linguistics, his argument implies that he thinks the laws broken most often should all be repealed.

Imagine a world where everything was spelled like vanity plates.
You need some type of objective standard in language, otherwise things could deviate to the point of illegibility.
And I agree with bean's comments above.

As far as that fun image goes, I think that the person who wrote it wasn't a criminal mis-speller--they might have just ran out of letters.

Whenever I see a few poorly spelled words on the internet I try to see them as typos because that often happens to me. I guess I prefer to give the writer the benefit of the doubt, especially if the content is reliably lucid. However, there have been many times when the spelling was so atrocious I was convinced it was written by someone using english as a second language or a total numb nut.

That makes me die a little on the inside. But then again, I was an English major and am still a minor grammar Nazi (although I definitely have my share of typos).

If the rules in place don't really do anything, then what's the point of going to the trouble of getting rid of them? What would it really accomplish?

Besides, this isn't a new idea.

But then again, aside from "twelfth" I have no problem spelling properly. I'd like to hear the opinion of someone who can't spell.

I agree with bean on that; what works for the legal system does not necessarily apply in liguistics. I accept certain alternate spellings (by the by, "misspelt" is a word: the British version of the American "misspelled"), but not carelessness. Admittedly, corruptions often become the official spelling over time. But a great many common misspellings are simply a display of ignorance --- ignorance of the root word, or of how word endings are applied when conjugating or showing possession.

The results can be comical (such as a sign outside a certain "cemetAry" in Blackwood, New Jersey), confusing or even dangerous in certain situations. Once I failed the written test portion of a job application because of a grammatical screw-up in a question. It was unclear exactly what the question was asking, and depending on the spelling of a word and the placement of a comma, there were three possible (and very different) meanings! All of them were probable as well. When I asked for clarification, I was tersely told to "just answer the question." (I've discovered that this response translates to "I don't know, and I'm angry that you asked the question.") So I re-wrote the question all three ways, and provided three different answers. Apparently, this was the cause of my failing the test. The store folded in three months --- whether this was due to poor communication skills, I may never know.

im in ur languag spelin ur wurdz.

Disgusting. That's just one step closer to the future foretold of in the movie Idiocracy.

Also, I saw what you did in the title there. ;p

@Nicholas

I know, there's a famous grammar example of difference in:

1) What's that up in the road ahead?
and
2) What's that up in the road, a head?"

Probably not similar to your test questions, but it reminded me of that.

I can't believe "thier" is on the list. NBC could do a six month campaign of David Schwimmer explaining "Their/They're/There" via "the more you know" for a fraction of the governments efforts, and probably cure that disease forever. And as far as allowing misspellings as a society? That's a poison.

The "place" that I thought the criminologist was coming from was in regards (just kidding, it's as regards) to the tendency some people have of correcting misspellings or typos on myspace. Probly not what he meant, thought. Like, you can usually understand what the writer means to say. I was surprised it's/its wasn't one of the twelve variants.

the reason there is a "correct" way to spell something is so that we all interpret the same abstract squiggles the same way. otherwise, people WILL spell the same word in a multitude of ways:

THERE = THER = DER = THEAR = T@R#

and different people can even use the same abstract squiggles for different words:

PERSON A: THERE = DER
PERSON B: THEIR = DER
PERSON C: THEY'RE = DER

with that said, language just naturally evolves (or doesn't and dies out). there will be people who will stick to the "traditional" rules and there will be people who will break the rules and "innovate" and over time, a compromise is always found.

People should just learn to spell!

I agree with Jean, people should really learn to spell! Legalize variate spelling can't be a good idea. Think of it if everybody is spelling the same word in another way, you won't understand what people want to say. You will feel like if you talking to somebody from abroad who doesn't speak your language, because everybody would use his/her favorite spelling. In my opinion that's the best way to kill languages. Maybe you could compare it with the built of the tower of babel.

I think this is disgusting. It may sound extreme, but is it not depressing that we now live in a society where if something is problematic or wrong, we just throw up our hands and say "well, i guess we'll just have to pretend that's ok"? It is not ok to allow spelling mistakes as "alternate spellings", in the same way that it would not be ok for a teacher marking an exam to accept the wrong answer to a mathematical problem as an "alternate answer". We need to stop the dumbing down of our culture, and how can we even begin to do that when we give up on educating and helping people and instead just welcome their mistakes as variants on what is correct? What will happen when that kind of attitude spreads to everyone, including NASA technicians, doctors, or military leaders?

Not all alternate spellings are errors. I was educated in America but now I live in South Africa and have adapted my spellings to the British forms, since I write contracts and business letters for local use. As I have now habituated these spellings, they also show up in my internet writings. "Harbour" is an alternate spelling of "harbor" and is neither incorrect nor a typo.

Spelling was standardized by the invention of the dictionary...before Samuel Johnson, people actually did spell things pretty much however they wanted. This did not deter the creation of great works of literature, but it did require people to be rather attentive to the works they read. Perhaps not such a bad thing, all things considered...

Or we could switch to Hangul (Korean). The alphabet is simpler and if "you can say it, you can spell it." It also combines like sounds into one letter. For example: a hard G and a K (which sound very much alike) are represented by same letter. Same for P, B, F and V.

Good Christ no.

wot wood this doo 2 da langwidg?

And I am further appalled that this was suggested by an English academic.

I should examine their admissions policies at Bucks* New University before espousing the diminution of the language.

If your students are too ignorant to be able to write coherently, mayhaps they should not have been given a place in a tertiary educational establishment?

I have read in amazement "Should of" in place of "should HAVE".

What next? Variant mathematics?

(* Bucks is the accepted shorthand in England for Buckinghamshire, it's not Honest Buck's New University.)

wasn't it G.B. Shaw who pointed out that the word

GHOTI = FISH ?

The GH from Cough, the O from wOmen, and the TI from Station.

For someone who loved language he had some rum ideas for it's overhaul.

Oh and as an aside.

Harbor is an alternate of Harbour, not the otherway around.

English English predates American English quite significantly,the alternate stems from the source not vice versa.

We did that in Germany. Don't do it. There is no SYSTEM behind common-misspellments. (Is THAT a word?)

They vary from week to week.

....yea minus that -! Im outta here.

This is like watching fish in a barrel committing suicide with a cannon of irony. Let's see...where to begin?

- Nicholas Dollak
"...what works for the legal system does not necessarily apply in liguistics..."
Muddled. Use either "work" or "apply". Something applies "to", not "in". And finally, you spelled "linguistics" incorrectly.

-chudez
In English we capitalize ("capitalise" in the UK) the first letter of a word at the start of a new sentence or paragraph.

- Warenwirtschaft
"Legalize variate spelling can’t be a good idea."
Surely you meant: "Legalizing variant spelling can't be a good idea"

- Crantz
ONE USES CAPITAL LETTERS WHEN SPELLING "OK"

-Polx
I know it sounds "cool" and "edjumacated" but "mayhaps" is not a word.

if we did not make the effort of learning our own language, there would be a LOT of teachers out of a job, along with many other skilled professionals. i think what makes language so unique is that we have so many grammatical/spelling variations. i mean, there are people out there who have jobs DEPENDING on their ability to mock our language. sometimes called satire, or puns, or jokes, or humor.

also, like many others mentioned, it would completely devalue what evolution we humans have gone through (and please spare me the religious debate against evolution... evolution is not just a theory related to species origin.) part of who we are is the language we speak. if we let our language dissolve, our intellect will soon follow. then we'll all be grunting and making sounds at each other, and maybe we can bring the dinosaurs back. if our species can go backwards, why can't others come back?

Vat iz a redikyoulus eyedeer. Wile evrywun myte evenshulee undrstanned viss parergraf wiv sum decoading, kan ew imajin redeing a hole novl oar skewl tekstbuk vat woz ritten in viss weigh? Ewe mite be aibull to piq yore wai frue vuh techst byt bye byt but its knot mutch phun iz it?

If we accepted every erroneous spelling as a valid alternative, it would take far too long to read anything of any reasonable length. We would also have problems distinguishing between homophones. Smith's logic is absurd.

The whole interesting thing about words like harbour is that in the original Latin, "Honour", "Labour", etc... were spelled "Honor" and "Labor". The English added in the "u".

Another note: British include the "u", Americans exclude it, and Canadians use either.

Spell check technology is getting better and better. I can get the little squiggly red lines under my misspelled words on the internet now! Not to mention auto-correct on Word.

My sister-in-law is a third grade teacher in Georgia. She says that when one of her students misspell a word on a paper, she is not allowed to mark it wrong unless it is an actual spelling test.

Anybody else remember Ebonics?

Yeah. That failed too.

I think this proves that a real idiot can still teach and the next time one of my son's teachers pulls the "I'm a teacher" thing, I'm going to point to this dork as an example of why we shouldn't respect teachers in 2008.

Some math mistakes are quite common as well. Perhaps we should accept those as 'variant answers'?

Why can't these people use a spellchecker?!

If we did that, people would get pissed off when they used their own spelling and other people didn't know what they meant. Egos would run rampant. People would start fighting over which variant was better.

Why can't morons just shut the hell up and learn how to spell?

This is asinine. It isn't done with any other disciplines. Why let spelling slide? What about math next? Are the science teachers going to allow a student to use 2x5=11 in a science calculation, since it isn't a math test? No! Fundamentals should be graded, regardless of the class.

The irony inherent here in this suggestion is that prior to the printing press and the wide dissemination of the written word, spelling was not standardized and largely depended on the dialect of English spoken in a particular area. Searching through databases of old documents is tremendously frustrating because of trying to account for all of those variants. Over time, language, printing, and education evolved to the point where we started ruling out variations to avoid confusion. So those folks who want to allow language to "evolve" in such a way that it allows a set list of variants are actually suggesting that it we undo a part of English that was a product of a previous adaptation.

The other irony here is that what Smith is suggesting is not a natural evolution. Rather, it's a formal change to educational curriculum that votes to standardize misspellings (at which point, they would no longer be incorrect spellings of the words.) So instead of solving the problem of learning how to spell the word one way, educators would actually be required to learn a new "correct" way to spell words that they already knew how to spell correctly.

The other aspect that would be interesting is how these changes be accepted in the rest of the world. I'd hate to see a college paper of a kid who is brought up in one community that tolerates variant spellings.

And what about the international reception of this on the internet. If we wanted to search for a speech from Twelfth Night would we going to have to search run multiple searches for "speach twelfth night," "speech twelth night," "speech twelfth night," and "speach twelth night?"

I should point out, LangigeNaxi, that i'm not so much of a pedant that i let things like not capitalising words on the internet be included in my outrage (you ought to have noticed that from the rest of my comment). Language evolves, we all know this; if i were angry about that, i'd boycott the entire internet. Don't tell me you've never written "u" instead of "you" in a post or text message. On the internet, it's about being casual. What gets my goat (or ghoti XD) is that this isn't evolution, just laziness and surrender to the decay of a language. And while you chortlingly point out other people's small mistakes, i have decided that i'd rather a world full of misspellers than a world populated by pedants. OK?

We have all made spelling and grammatical errors. In fact, most of us make them often. That does not make them right, and it does not mean we should accept them as standard.
If someone makes a spelling mistake, any spelling mistake, whether common or rare, they should not be subject to ridicule for it. I do think there should be no issue with the POLITE correction of said errors.
Myself, if I'm spelling something incorrectly, I want to know it so I don't look like an idiot again and again.
As for 'leet speak, it's shorthand, it happens, and if you're typing on a cell phone, or you're trying to type while killing a monster in a game, it makes sense.
That said, I wish I had a utility that lets me (at my leisure) make the choice ... if it is not important enough to you to type it out, it is not important enough to me to read it.
Choosing not to learn correct spellings when you become aware you have made a spelling error or used the wrong homonym is a CHOICE. At that point it is not a mistake. It is a CHOICE to defy the status quo and use something that you know is harder to understand. In other terms, it is choosing to be irritating in order to avoid change, effort and/or admission of fault.

I should have registered my name before another Violet showed up, but oh well.

Misspellings really only hurt the writer, and even if you "legalized" these misspellings, they would still exist as indicators of the author's lack of command of the language, with whatever attendant deficiencies you associate with that.

My beef is that it's just not that difficult to figure out the correct spellings for words with crucial distinctions like there/they're/their so that both the writer's intentions and the reader's comprehension are in harmony. I've seen people use the different spellings of those homonyms in the same paragraph, incorrectly. If you're going to take a stab at using the different forms, why not learn what they mean?

There means there. It's right there.
They're means they are. It's pretty self-evident.
Their means possession. You can remember that one because it's the one that's not the other two.

The relative simplicity of learning these spellings makes the writer who has not taken the time to do so seem truly ignorant, perhaps unfairly, and wrecks the credibility of the author, even if his points have merit. So you do yourself a favor if you take a minute to write correctly: you create a foundation upon which your ideas and opinions can be absorbed without the distraction, and the contingent reliability issues, of improper spelling.

Criminology lecturer? Tell me who killed the vocabulary.

He sounds like a bitter spelling bee loser to me.

I sounded outraged? I was having a blast. I hope you noticed that I focused my "outrage" on the pedants like yourself?
If it was up to me, I would risk letting English deteriorate into a mess of grunts and farts if it meant getting rid of the grammar-fascists.

All I learned from this post is I am hungry

i can has cheeceburger?

LangigeNaxi --

capitalization of the first character in a sentence is the correct protocol except when you're stealing office time to put in some comments into neatorama

ahahahah
double sheeeeee burgr

Polx said, "What next? Variant mathematics?"

EXACTLY. I can't think of any other field of academic study where getting the answer "almost" right is accepted.