Hear, hear! (Or should that be 'here, here!'? ;-)) I will freely admit that I do not write perfectly - and I don't always take the time to proofread and spellcheck before I click "Send" or "Post" - but the amount of near-indecipherable garbage out there makes me want to bury my head amongst the classics. Especially when it's in the newspaper or a professional journal.

I completely agree with you and I love your blog.

Also, you spelled 'malleable' incorrectly.

Unless, of course, you are using the British variation of the word, in which case, you rock.

Because as we all know, everything is better with a British accent.

No, you are correct. "Maleable" is incorrect, everywhere in the English-speaking world. Mea culpa. It is, however, the correct spelling in Spanish, and since that's my second language, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

But I beg to differ regarding a British accent making everything sound better. With a proper Queen's English accent, a Mancunian accent, a Scots accent, a Cornish accent, or even an Irish accent, that's true. But a Welsh accent just sounds weird. {grin}

Agreed. Especially when it comes out of Catherine Zeta-Jones' mouth. (not a big fan of her, excluding her performance in Chicago.)

And what's a Mancunian accent? I'm going to look that one up now...

"Mancunian": of the city of Manchester. I can't think of any famous Mancunians who actually sound like they are, but the lads in the movie "The Full Monty" (set in nearby Sheffield) are a fair approximation.

Very well-argued, though I do have some further observations.

As a Canadian, and one who was raised with British spellings as the rule, I have often looked at the truncation and/or simplification words (e.g. "thru") as being American but I concede that it is now becoming a global phenomenon. I purposely leave in the u's in words like "colour" and "neighbour" and reverse the r and e in "centre" but I do so only to retain the Canadian flavour in my writing.

While it frustrates me to have to do two (or more) web searches to find the best information due to spelling inconsistencies, for the most part, I still understand what people are writing.

I have a history degree and one of the things that has stuck with me over the years came from studying the Rennaisance: the best way to kill a language is to enforce its standardization. Rennaisance scholars chose to standardize Latin, in some cases adopting centuries-old spellings of words.

One reason that English is so widespread is that it has continued to grow. Foreign words have always been introduced into the language, sometimes with spelling adjustments, sometimes without.

Ultimately, "amateur" is being spelled "amature" to be more consistent with other English words that sound the same [in the common pronunciation]: mature, sure, cure, manure, and so on. The fact that English words are still being adjusted for consistency means that it will continue to live as a language.

By the way, I am not spell-checking this post, so flame away if you feel the need.

Don't get me wrong; I love English's ability to evolve and adapt. (The French Academy is probably going to end up by putting the French language in a jar of formaldehyde, like happened with Latin.) I'm just disturbed by the sheer scope of the mutations. Maybe that makes me like the dinosaurs alarmed by the wild range of furry mammals appearing in the early Cenozoic Period, but just because they were doomed to extinction doesn't mean they were wrong. {smile}

Fair enough. And I agree about French and the formaldahyde... although Canadian French continues to evolve.

As for the "sheer scope of the mutations," I agree that some are getting ridiculous (especially those brought about by text messaging -- even worse than chatroom abbreviations) as illustrated by the comment you linked to in the original argument.

However, just to be the devil's advocate, there were just as many mutations in 17th and 18th century England, which prompted several attempts at an English dictionary, culminating in Samuel Johnson's work... so maybe we just need a new dictionary {smile}

... in the last century ... the lower class got its hands on (reading and writing) ... because of the "new" American public education system.

It is impossible to learn to spell English. That's why we have spelling bees. I was in the first class to use the 'beta' version of "Hooked on Phonics." If you know anything about that, you know my exact age and the fiasco it created. Every adult who took that course as a kid is lousy at spelling. But the point I want to make is, I have learned to improve my spelling by having spell check on while I type. Computers have done for me, what teachers failed at.

Spelling skills are commendable only to the point of recognizing rote learning skills. Computers are making those skills less necessary.

Computer languages (HTML, etc.) are like foreign languages, so what's your point? Computers are less than a century old and you expect one universal language to have evolved in this greedy capitalist environment? I agree that the fractured languages used on the internet are similar to English in their problems. Rather, look at another foreign language: German. German has a small set of rules for proper spelling. Consequently, a Spelling Bee is unheard of in Germany. By 8 years old German kids can spell anything.

Another foreign language, Japanese has had several revamps of their spelling, (what might look like calligraphy to you or me) The most recent in the 1950s. And several asian languages, Vietnamese and Korean, now have alternate Roman Alphabet spellings for words. These modern spellings also are difficult to confuse.

I propose a revamp of American English Spelling. Just the spelling. No need to go overboard like the french and forbid foreign words.

If it's impossible to learn to spell English, then nominate me for godhood, because I've pulled it off. OK, I make spelling mistakes, so maybe just demi-godhood. {smile} I'll grant you that English is difficult to spell correctly. But that's not just because we have inconsistent rules. It's also because we have so many words (one of the language's many strengths), taken from so many different languages. A single consistent spelling system isn't practical, because it isn't really a single language.

With all due respect, teaching spelling using spellcheckers is how we get functional illiterates who don't know the difference between your and you're... or even yore. Phonics may not be the be-all and end-all of teaching methods, but it has to be better than having kids just guess and let the computer (mis)correct them.

I'm convinced that the best way to teach people to spell effectively is to get them to read. I didn't do anything special to develop my spelling skills, like studying the dictionary or other stupid spelling-bee tricks. I certainly didn't depend on a computer with spell-checking software (which I didn't encounter in person until I was in my early 20's). I just read enough that I saw how words were put together, when (for example) whose was used instead of who's, and so on. Someone who types "amature" is probably doing so because they haven't seen the word in print very often. If they had, they'd know just from looking at it that it's incorrect.

I have no idea what you're talking about regarding computer languages. Where did you get the notion that I think there should (or could) be only one? For one thing, a mark-up language like HTML serves an entirely different purpose from a procedural language such as C++, so they could never be replaced by each other, or by another single language. There are hundreds of computer languages in active use, and that's as it should be.

But the usage of each particular language (and also protocols, which is what I was really talking about) requires standards for it to be useful. Without the W3C to push for standard HTML, ANSI and ISO to codify C, IETF to write the specs for TCP/IP, etc. these would all become more trouble than they're worth.

(By the way, "less than a century" is being overly generous. The earliest practical programming languages - Fortran, LISP, Algol, COBOL - are only 45-50 years old.)

Amateur rhymes with "mature"? No way. Sorry for being pedantically French, but the correct pronunciation of amateur is "amateurr" (eurr as in "burr").

Another currently popular misspelling is "propoganda" for propaganda. You can see it all over the blogs, especially those who disagree with Michael Moore.

Apparently, when newspapers used metal type to set text, there were no spelling errors. Now that we rely on computers' intelligence more than our own, things tend to go wrong.