Apathy Sketchpad

I noticed today that one of my Facebook friends has joined a group called “If no other country will take Gary Glitter, why the F**K should we!!!!”. It’s one of those irritating sentences intended as a rhetorical question but which in fact has a simple answer, which totally undermines the point. Its wall makes for depressing reading, but it is at least polite of these morons to line up near a wall — it will save everyone a job when the revolution comes. The group is full of the same irony-resistant people who demand all foreign criminals be deported.

Sharon Welham-Jones Was Stocker (London) wrote
It makes me so damn angry why the hell do we want that monster back in our country???????? argggggg makes me so angry

It makes me angry that nobody on Facebook knows the word “née”.

There are a disturbing number of people advocating torturing him — sometimes I worry that people would welcome an Orwellian dystopia, which rather defeats the point — but these are I think the most graphic:

Mellissa Salvage (Bristol) wrote
if i had my way, i would take him somewhere in the middle of nowhere-tie him up and everyday, stick pins in his dick and singe his pubes-i hateeeeeeeeeeeee this man and all other evil paedophiles-they are scum, set his head on fire with petrol and let him suffer a long slowwwwwww death, but then killing him is far too good for him!!!!!!!! Just let him ROT!!!!!

(Evil paedophiles are the worst kind.)

Ed Bear wrote

You lot are all TOO KIND !! , slowly peel off the sick fucks skin inch by inch then apply salt , i think that over the course of a week he’d be skinless but still alive , THEN let the mothers have a go at whats left !! .

Dave Oldman wrote

vile nonce needs putting down,like the rest of them.

take him down the shed,put his prick in the vise and remove the t.bar.
put a blunt knife on the bench.
set fire to the shed.

then sit back,pour yourself a beer and wait.

…and this is the craziest:

Tom Sta (Wales) wrote

i agree with becky he needs his throat cut and the rest of his body cut into lil pieces and buried in different parts of the uk like william wallace just to make sure the lil bugger being polite aint alive

There are also a lot of comments suggesting paedophiles be visibly branded in various ways (my favourite being dipping them in orange dye — bad news for them but great news for the sales of Tango), a practice as undesirable as it is pointless in the case of a man who’s been in every newspaper for a month.

I mean, steady on. It seems to me perfectly plausible that he was born how he is, same as gay people can’t become straight and vice versa. How many people could honestly go their whole lives without indulging their sexual desires even once? Surely any humane society will at least try an understanding approach first?

Offering paedophiles libido inhibiting drugs seems smart to me. It’s more a medical intervention, and apparently it works. The act should be punished; the condition should be understood. And if this stupid country could get over its collective pantomime-villain complex about paedophiles then maybe they could discreetly get the drugs without molesting any children, but of course that wouldn’t be barbaric enough.

Ironically, the wingnuts calling for him to be castrated may have stumbled by chance onto a relatively sensible idea. Like this guy:

Dave Smith (London) wrote

Paedophiles are fucking immature arseholes.

Well of course they are — that’s what paedophiles do.

Sadly this one missed that idea by a few anatomically significant feet:

Rebecca Jones wrote

Paedophiles should have their eyes gouged out and their hands chopped off. Lets see how much beastliness they can get up to then!

When faced with the answer “because he’s British, you morons” (I’m paraphrasing) they hide behind this kind of thing:

Matthew Brown (Belvidere Secondary School) wrote

im sorry… i dont give a fukin shit if hes british u try tellin tht 2 a group of mothers and see if deyu care, he shudnt be allowed in our country cuz hes sick, he shud be punished sevealy and i 4 1 would love 2 help kick his puny little ass

So what’s your idea? Fly him around the world until he dies and invite idiots to hurt him? This point was raised…

Paul Gregson wrote

I hate Gary Glitter and paedophiles in general but this group is stupid and pointless. He was born here and is an English citizen, that is why we should take him back. Simple as that. We can’t just dump all of the UK’s paedophiles on other countries, he is english so it is our responsibilty to deal with him. Seeing as though this group has over 700 members, lets see if anyone can answer the following question without being rude or aggressive. Afterall we are all adults and paedophilia is very serious, so lets discuss this seriously like adults. If you don’t believe that we should let Gary Glitter (an English citizen who has travelled to another country and sexually abused children there) back into this country then what country do you believe we should send him to? Bear in mind when answering this question that “Capital Punishment” doesn’t take place in the UK and he can’t sent to the US to face “Capital Punishment” either.

…and this was the answer, or at least the reply:

Rebecca Hawkesford-Whelan (West Midlands) wrote

In answer to Pauls question, I dont believe we should let him into any other country, why make any other country deal with him, I hasten to add that if I were able to make the decision about where he and other paedophiles were to go then I like the idea of a rocket, a couple of engines and a few days travel to mars, that would be a lovely place for them all to live along side rapists, murderers, people who harm animals and also those lovely people who clobber old men and ladies over the head for their last couple of quid. Is that an adult enough answer to your question?? <TAKES A BOW>

<TAKES A BOW> is almost as good as “end of”, isn’t it?

Paul Gregson has some great replies in there:

To be honest Rebecca that isn’t an adult enough answer to my question. Sending humans to Mars is estimated to cost between $20 Billion and $450 Billion which of course isn’t finacially viable. So in conclusion your suggestion is null and void and you have no reason whatsoever to be taking a bow.

He should burn in hell and he is a complete cunt but while he is actually on earth and not being tortured in a mythical realm what do you suggest we do with him?

I don’t think ‘conflict of interests’ means what Damian Trump thinks it means…

Damian Trump (London) wrote

There is a serious confict of interests between our gov and us the people. 99.9 % would say fuckoff and die you arse fiddling goat shaggin life wrecker- and our gov who say yes ofcourse Sir come in oh and how much did you say you would contribute !
Why when our steets are already unsafe-espeacialy so for our children !
We really should do something dont you agree ?
But thts the problam with brits we say and dont do.

I like that you say and don’t do. Apart from the bit where you say.

Michelle Pearson (Nottingham) wrote
he should b fukin killed not let into this country.. every parent will be worried about their children now.. shouldnt this country do whts rite by us not a paedo.. we should do what every other country has dne n not let him in our society

Yes, one frail old man who everyone recognises is a serious threat.

Stephen Cook wrote

he has no right to to call himself glitter it should be shitter

Yeah! Or “Gritter”! That’ll show him!

Steph Bell (West Midlands) wrote

nobody wants the dirty old bastard we should have just dropped him in the sea with a brick!

What is the brick for in that? There’s a pretty narrow band of sea where he could make it back to shore as long as he didn’t have a brick.

Courtney Spellacy (London) wrote

its not just glitter though is it
whats worse is that registered sex offenders/paedophiles are also allowed to access these sites
someone i know phoned up facebook complaining that a known paedophile was using the site but facebook wouldn’t do anything because he wasn’t put in prison for downloading child porn, its not just living near or around them, they are on here!
and its absolutely sickening

In many ways, there should be an age limit on the Rape Me application.

Phil Middleton (West Midlands) wrote

2 words: Scum bag!

Two words: more on.

I just tell myself these people are the minority, over and over again. I never dare check if it’s true.

This month, I’m awarding the title of Crackpot to Father Sean McDonagh, and to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, whoever they might be. He has decided, based on scripture, that you can’t use GM wheat for the Eucharist. Which is fair enough, you might think, but… well, there’s really very little non-GM wheat available. It’s about the most artificial plant there is. Even if God created man, man created things like poodles and bread-wheat.

But even so, all this was done before Jesus supposedly lived, so let’s grant him that God picked a man-made crop, and let’s even grant him literal trans-substantiation (albeit because it’s irrelevant rather than because it’s even remotely reasonable). The mental acrobatics he must have done before this made sense are enough to win him the award:

Fr McDonagh quotes from Canon Law 924, section two, which stipulates: “the bread must be wheaten only, and recently made, so that there is no danger of corruption.”

But he says that genetically-engineered wheat is not “made solely from wheat” because of protein added to make it resistant to a weed killer. “For example, people who suffer coeliac disease are unable to absorb gluten, a protein found in wheat. Eating even small amounts of wheat can make them ill.

“In recent decades, it has been possible to extract the gluten from wheaten bread so that people can eat bread without endangering their health. Despite the fact that gluten-wheat poses a health threat, which can often be serious, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith stated in a reply in 1982 that, ‘the local Ordinary could not permit a priest to consecrate special gluten-free hosts for the communion of coeliacs’,” writes Fr McDonagh.

So your theory is that God, in his infinite wisdom and compassion, gave loads of people a medical condition that means they can’t eat wheat, and then required them to eat wheat every Sunday? That regular wheat can literally become the body of Jesus but GM and gluten-free wheat can’t? What part of that is supposed to make sense?

And even ignoring all of the above, basically allow him to invent his own reality, he’s still wrong — because gluten-free wheat is “made solely from wheat”, just with a bit taken out, and the whole analogy is nonsense in any case.

How shitty a person do you have to be to expect people to eat poison for God?

I had this on my Google Reader feed, but I thought it deserved highlighting properly: it’s the Divine Comedy’s song about Guantanamo Bay, with mildly naff video accompaniment. It’s good that people are doing this kind of thing — it’s disturbing how easy it is to forget about something like Guantanamo once it’s been out of the news for a while.

According to the manufacturers, my diary contains “detailed information pages”.

Here is some information that is not included anywhere in my diary:

• A map of the city where I live
• Timetables for bus or train services

Here is some of the information that did make the cut:

• Road and rail maps of London, where I never go.
• A relief map of South America.
• A chart to show which wines are best.
• The number of ounces in a hectogram, whatever the crap a hectogram is.
• The dialling code for Trinidad and Tobago.
• The UN’s web address.
• The phone number of the Association of British Insurers

I simply cannot think what that’s for. There are loads of phone numbers in there. The ones for airports and suchlike I can imagine being useful, but all of the others are not. In what situation would I be able to call Sports Wales but not Directory Enquiries? Is it for if I’m at a payphone and only have 50p? This stuff is what Google is for. Why do these idiots think it’s useful to me to have the Patent Office’s phone number about my person at all times? Do they think I’ll be in a shop, think “hey, that product violates patent number US D522914!” and immediately call them up so they can send their emergency response unit in? Didn’t they notice as they were compiling all that information how incredibly easy a job it was, and why didn’t it occur to them that if they could track it down with such ease, so could anyone else?

Maybe if there is an asteroid hurtling towards me and I don’t have time for Directory Enquiries, I can look up the Liberal Democrat Party’s phone number in my diary and alert Lembit Opik.

It’s ridiculous.

Updated on 22nd August, see bottom.

Today’s g2 contains a dull and ill-thought-out article about whether or not animals feel grief, by Justine Hankins, who used to be the Guardian’s “pets editor”. It’s perhaps to be expected, then, that she is eager to think animals have human feelings. It’s nice to see her questioning the rest of the media for taking this too far, but personally, I’m not sure she’s quite got the hang of it yet…

Photographs of Gana, an 11-year-old gorilla in Munster Zoo, holding the lifeless body of her three-month-old infant… have prompted headlines such as “Heartbreaking” and “A Mother’s Grief”. … Are we too quick to project human feelings onto animals, particularly our closest ape relatives?

…René Descartes believed that… animals are no more capable of higher emotion than a clock. But, as anyone who has been watching Richard Dawkins’ Channel 4 series The Genius of Darwin will recall, evolution favours any species with strong enough parental instincts to see their young through infancy. Animals invest time, energy and genetic material into their young, just as we do, and they naturally want them to survive.—

Let’s be careful with the word “want”. Once you say “want” you’re kind of begging the question: anything that “wants” has emotions. I think you’re being too quick to project human feelings onto our closest ape relatives again. If you start bandying words like “want” about then before you know it you’re going to say something like

Is it too much of a stretch to imagine that they would also feel loss when their young die?

Yes.

Evolution probably doesn’t care too much what happens to mothers of dead infants. Evolving to stop caring for dead children is probably low down the genetic priority list, several items beneath keeping the children alive in the first place. There’s no reason to imagine that the gorilla’s behaviour is the result of grief. It could just as easily be well-meaning genes misfiring. Grief is totally unnecessary to explain any part of gorilla behaviour that I’m aware of.

Of course, they might. I don’t know. Hankins’ argument has utterly failed to convince me, but I really have no idea how gorillas work. I’ve not, say, been observing wild baboons in Namibia for years, but that’s probably why there’s a quote from a man who has, and he’s “reluctant to describe this as grief in the human sense”. That’s that settled, then, presumably…

Gana has a history of neglecting her young, and the infant’s death may have been a result of her poor parenting. So perhaps it’s not so much grief as guilt she’s exhibiting. Or maybe that’s an anthropomorphic step too far.

Yes it damn well is! Why must you persist in this? You’ve started by trying to explore quite a complex question in a 300-word column, and ended up saying nothing except “maybe”, and posing another, almost identical question. What possible use is that?

The article frustrated me mostly because it was 300 words of nothing, beyond raising a question that could have been just as easily posed in fifteen. The opening paragraph made it sound interesting, but there was no worthwhile discussion around the theme at all — a fact made even more annoying since she’d clearly interviewed someone who could have provided some. Hankins started out by observing that journalists liked to ascribe human feelings to animals and spent the whole column indulging in exactly the same wooly thinking.

Might as well have let Gana write the column for all the content we’d have missed out on.

I would love to look indepth at the media’s odd relationship with animals – but you get 300 words and a couple of hours and that’s it. I know it’s not perfect but it’s how the media works. I personally was quite shocked at how some of the media had protrayed this incident as if it was exactly the same as the feelings a human mother would have. I have a deep respect and affection for animals, but in general, this sort of sentimentality is not good for our understanding of animals and doesn’t apparently make us treat them any better.

With which I agree — she’s quite right to highlight the absurdity. My problem was that she also seemed to be indulging in it in the same column.

By ending the piece with the gorilla’s bad parenting record – I was trying to deflate the ‘heartbroken mother’ angle – sorry if it didn’t come off. If I ever get the chance, I’ll finish off the opening in a more challenging way!

After reading all of the above, I feel a bit bad and think that maybe the bit about evolution was misjudged, and came across (to me, anyway) as a genuine argument thrown in for balance, and that made the last paragraph read more like squirming than parody, a narrative trying to reach a conclusion that its own evidence won’t support.

At this point there’s not much I can do but sit here criticising the composition of the thing, which is well outside my comfort zone (besides which I’ve probably now written more words about this column than it contained, which is verging on tragic), so I think I shan’t bother. Anyone who’s used the internet for more than about an hour knows that it can be very difficult to detect irony in text — it says a lot for writers that most of the time readers understand them properly. In this case, whether my fault or hers, I didn’t read it as it was intended to read; let’s leave it at that.

from: KEN KUBE
reply-to: mr_ken@mail.ru
to:
date: 13 July 2008 20:46
subject: FROM: Mr. Ken Kube.

FROM: Mr. Ken Kube.
Good Day,
Please Read.
My name is Mr Ken Kube, I’m the credit officer in International Credit Bank Ouagadougou Burkina Faso.
I have a business proposal in the tune of $5.5m, (Five Million Five hundred Thousand only) after the successful transfer; we shall share in ratio of 40% for you and 60% for me.
Should you be interested, please contact me through my private email (mr_ken@mail.ru) so we can commence on all arrangements and I Will give you more information on how we would handle this project.
Please treat this business with utmost confidentiality and send me the
Following information:
(1) Full names:
(2) Private phone number:
(3) Current residential address:
(4) Occupation:
(5) Age and Sex:
Kind Regards,
Mr. Ken Kube.
Note: Strictly reply through my private email account if interest is shown.

This is my reply:

from: Andrew Taylor
to: mr_ken@mail.ru
date: 13 July 2008 22:20
subject: Re: FROM: Mr. Ken Kube.

2008/7/13 KEN KUBE <mr_ken35@biz.by>:

FROM: Mr. Ken Kube.
Good Day,
Please Read.
My name is Mr Ken Kube,

No, it isn’t. Don’t be ridiculous.

That didn’t get a response.

We all know about Islam in Turkey. But turkey in Islam seems also to be a big thing, at least if the halal-only Subway stores are anything to go by.

I can understand the idea behind halal chicken and so forth. It’s the fact they sell a halal ‘ham’ option that puzzles me. Pigs are considered “unclean” in Islam, so the ham comes from a turkey. That’s daft enough to begin with, but the turkey breast sub is still there. So you have a choice of two distinct turkey-based subs. In fact, it’s better than that, because Subway also offer bacon, which again is made from turkeys in the Halal stores. This means that the turkey breast and ham sub is now turkey and turkey, and the Subway Melt becomes turkey, turkey and turkey, so there are four subs with different combinations of turkey on them, and two options — double meat and ‘add bacon’ — to increase your turkey intake yet further.

It seems to me that a far more sensible approach would have been to leave regular ham and bacon from pigs on the menu for non-Muslims who might want to eat it, and trust the Islamic community not to break their own rules and then complain about being given the opportunity to do so.

Or just design an entire halal menu that isn’t bloody stupid.

Tonight my brother showed me 2D physics-based game Fantastic Contraption, more-or-less a Flash version of The Incredible Machine, but for adults. You have a small area to build a machine, and you have to effect some goal outside that area. I rapidly found my style of play.

Here are my solutions. I may have got some of the level names wrong.

• The Grabber (Back and Forth) — similar to this solution, really.
• Flailey Tank (Up The Stairs) — as you can see, by now I was getting pretty into building little carts to move stuff about.
• Spatula Tank (Big Ball) — tanks made this level easy. Other players went for speed. Some went for Sling It And Hope. I went for Power!
• Serious Tank (Awash) — Serious Tank will take all comers.
• Kamikaze Tank (Mission to Mars) — I had done this in the Normal Boring Way, but that didn’t involve nearly enough tanks for me to get really excited by it.
• Short Work Tank (The Wall) — Short Work Tank rolls over the wall with such consummate ease that the Chinese government will probably block this link.
• Train Tank (Full Up) — I’m sure I was supposed to do this by knocking the big ball into the hole, but instead I built another tank.
• Oil Thing (Higher) — I did this using a tank as well, but this is so much better.
• Junktank (Junkyard) — About half of Junktank is pointless, but why on Earth would I remove it?
• Hill Tank Light (Up the Hump) — I did remove about half of Hill Tank. The big square block was Man enough for this.
• Scorpion (Down Under) — There are hardly any tanks at all in this one. But there are more than there are in this player’s solution. This one is also good (no tanks, though).
• Uptank (Tube) — Which isn’t really a tank at all, but if I call it “tank” it may become one. (Tanks are only called tanks because they were originally disguised as tanks of water.)
• Freight Tank (Handling) — This calls for flexibility and precision. The obvious solution is therefore another tank.
• Tank on a Chain (Unpossible) — Nothing is unpossible if you have a large enough tank.
• Slavedriver (Four Balls) — This is the only level I didn’t manage to complete using at least one tank. But don’t think that means I’m going easy on it. I’m getting Ancient Egyptian on its ass, Ancient Egypt apparently being the theme for this evening. I did consider this approach, but couldn’t get it to work.

[BPSDB] On my various travels through PubMed, Medline, Ovid SP (which is like the old Ovid but with a backlight) and Google Scholar, I come across a number of papers that really aren’t what I was looking for. Some of them are fascinating, though, so I’ve now got a 11MB folder full of PDFs that range from interesting through arcane to downright silly.

These include a paper¹ whose principal conclusion “is that the regional distribution of the incidence of violent injury is related to the regional distribution of the price of beer”, one about restoring torn up documents², a mildly terrifying study in which scientists managed to work out what someone was looking at by reading the information from their brain with electrodes³, and a fantastic paper in which someone built a device that can rotate objects without touching them using angular momentum carried by sound waves⁴ — and somehow managed to resist the geek temptation and so rather boringly called it an “acoustic spanner” (and people say that the science in Doctor Who is unrealistic).

But my current favourite is one entitled “Housing in Pyramid Counteracts Neuroendocrine and Oxidative Stress Caused by Chronic Restraint in Rats”⁵. The gist is: take 52 rats, and split them into 4 equal groups (or suits). One group is left well alone, the other three are put in “restrainers” in smaller groups of 3 or 4. This is designed to piss them off. Then, you put one group’s restrainers inside a Pyramid. The pyramid is a wooden affair two and a half feet tall, with a window and a hole for ventilation.

The four triangular sides of the pyramid angled upwards at nearly 51° to the base and met at the apex of the pyramid.

My word, the triangular sides met at the apex? So it was a pyramid, then. They even have a picture, in case you’re somehow still unsure what a ‘pyramid’ might be:

Figure 1: Ratiphar had very feeew cares…

Another group’s restrainer is left in normal conditions (in a presumably-non-pyramidal laboratory), and the last is left in a square box about the same size as the pyramid, because this is a strangely well-conducted seeming study considering how completely fucking mental you have to be to imagine that a pyramid shaped box can reduce stress in rats simply by being pyramid-shaped. They even made sure to align the square box due north, as if that made any difference. The rats (in their restraining cages) were even put on little stools in the boxes, because

Maximum effect of the pyramid is believed to be exerted at one-third the height of the pyramid from its base.

I would have thought maximum effect would be at the apex, since that’s where you’re in the most pyramids. But what do I know of Pyramid Power?

The whole thing looks like ‘cargo-cult science’ to me, right down to the extensive list of references — of which there are fifty-four, although quite a lot of them come from the same couple of books, and at least one is a Geocities page which apparently no longer exists (presumably due to being stored in an insufficiently-pyramidal server room). This latter is cited to support the sentence “Pyramid exposure is believed to put the mind into an alpha state”. This comes hot on the tails of the even better sentence “Research has shown that the energy field within the pyramid can act as antistressor and thus protect the hippocampal neurons from stress-induced atrophy (10)”, in which the promising-sounding Reference 10 is a PhD thesis (not apparently available online) from the same university that ran this study. Probably one of the authors’ luckless students. Another few references discuss “bioresonance”, apparently as something reasonable, to ground the pyramid theory in something people will accept, which would work if bioresonance wasn’t also a load of made-up shit.

The strange thing is, though, that despite all the made-up woo in the discussion section, and despite the rather preposterous premise being tested, it looks like a basically okay experiment. I’d have liked to see it run as a crossover, so we could make sure it was the pyramid rather than the rats being tested, and the square box was three times the volume of the pyramid because they matched base area and height, so there’s a chance the pyramid rats got less air than the controls, but it’s not at all a bad design. Ooh, a control group not aligned to the compass would have been good, too.

And yet, apparently, it worked. The rats in the pyramid were about as stressed as the rats in ordinary cages, whereas all the other rats that had been put in restrainers were pretty pissed off about it. Apparently this is reproducible because reference 11 is an almost identical study to this (right down to the main author) without restrainers.

Of course, I’m not about to convert to pseudoscience and declare that therefore pyramid power is real, partly because the odds of even a hundred p<0.05 results coming up on the trot are still far, far higher than the odds that the shape of a pyramid works “at a hormone level”, and also a bit because the most reproducible result in science is one you just make up.

But this is still interesting — because if this is genuine research, then on some unconscious level these researchers have conspired to rig this experiment very subtly, and I for one would very much like to find out how they did that. The endless lies and deceptions that the human brain pulls on its hapless owners is infinitely more fascinating than the crystals and dowsing and pyramids that result.

Read the rest of this entry »

Professor Ken Smith has a plan. It’s a rubbish plan, but a plan nonetheless. He wants to reduce the amount of errors students make. How? By reducing the number of things that are considered errors:

Teaching a large first-year course at a British university, I am fed up with correcting my students’ atrocious spelling. Aren’t we all!?

But why must we suffer? 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. University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell.

Let’s mention now that the course he teaches is in criminology and not English. Don’t assume he has any particular understanding of the language at all. Make him demonstrate that by clever writing*.

The spelling of the word “judgement”, for example, is now widely accepted as a variant of “judgment”, so why can’t “truely” be accepted as a variant spelling of “truly”?

Let’s mention now that as I write this Firefox’ British English spellchecker has chosen to underline “judgment” in red†. It has done this because ‘judgement’ is not so much a variant spelling as it is the principal (and to many, only acceptable) spelling. Not going so well for his demonstration so far. Still, here are some of his suggestions for words whose common misspellings should be adopted as variants:

Ignor for ignore

Well, sure, maybe, but only if we also accept ‘ador’, ‘bor’, ‘cor’, ‘deplor’, ‘for’, ‘gor’, ‘whor’, ‘lor’ and so on. Because otherwise people might think ‘ignor’ was pronounced like ‘elevator’ or ‘Bangor’. There are rules in place for a reason, dammit. Adding any more exceptions will only make life harder, especially for English-as-a-second-language speakers who will see this variant spelling and have utterly no idea what it is. This would seem to have the opposite effect to Smith’s implicit aim. Sure, it’ll be easier to write, but what use is that if it’s harder to read? Text is written once and read many times: the writer should accommodate the reader, not vice-versa. Writing well is hard, that’s inevitable; reading should be easy. If it’s not then the flow of the text is interrupted and that means the writer has failed whether he’s technically checked all the boxes or not. Of course what that means you should do depends on your audience, but the point stands: I moderate internet forums and I routinely have to tell people off for typing like they would in a text message. It’s inconsiderate: they’ve saved themselves maybe 10 seconds by missing out a few vowels, but between everyone who reads that post a good ten minutes more will be spent decoding it than if they’d just typed properly — and generally they’re the ones asking for help!

Occured for occurred. There is no second “r” in the words “occur” or “occurs” and that is why nearly everyone misspells this word. Would it really upset you to allow this change, and if so why?

That’s right, there is no second ‘r’ in ‘occur’ or ‘occurs’. But there’s no second ‘r’ in ‘mar’, ‘bar’, ’scar’ or ‘tar’, either, and they all get double ‘r’s in the past tense. Once again, the variant spelling goes against all standard usage rules. Also, “occured” implies the pronunciation ‘a-cured’, because that’s how the language works. I’m not against accepting new variants per se, of course. His suggestion of “speach”, for example, makes perfect sense to me. I see no particular reason why ’speak’ and ’speech’ should use different letters for the same sound. (Possibly, though, there is a shining good reason for this that I’m ignorant of. This is why you shouldn’t trust physicists and criminologists to prescribe changes to languages.) But I think that adopting variant spellings that go against established rules of the language will serve only to make the formally accepted form of English more complex, and it will dilute the meaning of the letters: what good is it to me knowing the difference between ‘planning’ and ‘planing’ if both are accepted as variants of the other? It’s unimportant, you might say, when we’re talking about words whose misspellings aren’t already other words, but I use it when I meet a new word: generally speaking, I can pronounce it without looking it up to see which letters are real and which are errors accepted by lazzez-faire editors at the behest of ignorant criminologists. Other variants he proposes that would be pronounced strangely if read according to the usual rules of English include “opertunity”, “arguement” and “que” (for ‘queue’). Oh, and these:

Thier for their … and all those others that break the “i” before “e” rule (weird, seize, leisure, neighbour, foreign etc)

Now first of all, because we’re constantly berating Creationists for doing exactly this to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the “i before e” rule in full goes “‘i’ before ‘e’, except after ‘c’, when the sound is ‘ee’”. The sound (at least, in Britain) in ‘leisure’, ‘foreign’, ‘neighbour’ and ‘their’ is clearly not ‘ee’, so those are not exceptions to any rule. Again, his proposed spellings would be unphonetic and, well, weird. What the hell is a nigh-ber? And can I covet theer ass?

Truely for truly. We don’t spell the adverb “surely” as “surly” because this would make another word, so why is the adverb of “true” spelt “truly”?

Maybe because ‘truly’ isn’t another word? I could just as easily (not ‘easyly’) argue that since ‘wholly’ isn’t spelt ‘wholely’, “truely” shouldn’t be accepted either. I’m unsure what the usual rules are here, as I honestly can’t think of another adjective ending in a vowel sound and then an ‘e’, so I can’t think of an ideal example to prove or disprove his point (although there’s a strong case for using ‘argument’ in the meantime — which you’d think he’d have spotted since he proposed accepting “arguement” in its stead). But whether he’s right or wrong, his argument for “truely” is still rubbish: the ‘e’ in ‘true’ isn’t needed in ‘truly’ because the ‘-ly’ ending modifies the ‘u’ in the same way; the ‘e’ in ’surely’ is needed to modify the ’s’ and stop the word becoming ’surly’. I don’t think ’sure’ is a very systematic word in any case, but this one is:

Twelth as twelfth

There is, it turns out, a lot more to spelling than mere phonetics. If there wasn’t, then the argument over “thier”/’their’ would go away: that word, as well as ‘they’re’ would be spelt ‘there’. Why not? That’s how they’re pronounced. But ‘twelfth’ is the ordinal version of ‘twelve’; you can’t just drop the ‘v’ just because you’re talking about a position now. That would be crazy. Okay, so it runs into the ‘th’ sound somewhat when you say it, but the consistency is elegant and informative. Okay, so it’s become an ‘f’ somewhere along the line, but that happens in ‘leaves’, ‘dwarves’, ‘hooves’ and ‘halves’ when you only have one of each, so I don’t think we should be complaining too much about that either. In fact, ‘twelfth’ is a perfectly simple word to spell — it follows the same rules as ‘fifth’ — and anyone who can’t spell it has been short-changed by English teachers who concentrated too much on rote learning of common words and not enough on how the language fits together (or, I suppose, naturally grasp language phonetically and have a problem with spellings). Most of the words on Smith’s list are ones whose spellings could be predicted by anyone who understands the language properly.

I just worry that if you adopt his suggestion of accepting the 10 most common errors as variants, there will still be 10 most common errors, and the errors are getting dumber but it’s getting easier to find example words spelt the same way because you allowed them in the last batch, and before you know it you’ll be writing like Shakespeare (only, you know, not so well).

I could support him if his thesis was “we should stop worrying so much about spelling in criminology exams”, but he wants to lower the bar for everyone to accommodate bad spellers, and I just can’t see how that’s remotely helpful. Aside from anything else, if you’re not proposing to change the official language in dictionaries, then why the most common errors? It doesn’t make sense to ignore mistakes on the basis of how many people make them — unless of course you’re just lazy.

For balance, here is another British secularist Andrew expressing the opposite opinion. I reckon that’s some pretty shit-hot balance right there.

†It’s also underlining “Firefox” and “spellchecker” so I’m not sure who coded it…