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…

I can’t see how this could help him. Since, if elected, John McCain is definitely going to die in office, he’s basically naming his Gordon Brown. Unfortunately, he only has two options. He can pick someone nobody’s heard of, in which case he’s basically pitching an unknown quantity against a far more popular unknown quantity, or else he can pick a high profile Republican, the problem there being that they’re all mental.

It’ll be interesting to see who he picks, but there’s no way it should ever make any difference.

Always remember to wrap on a t-shirt, splat on some suncream, and wear a hat.

1. The metre is rubbish. Two words are at the start of the phrase, and one is at the end. It doesn’t scan at all, because…
2. Hat is a noun. The other words are verbs, and…
3. ‘Splat’ is the wrong verb. Still, at least ’splat’ rhymes. After all…
4. ‘Wrap’ doesn’t rhyme with ’splat’ or ‘hat’. Essentially, the connection between these words is that they all have an ‘a’ in them. If it was “wrap, slap, cap”, that would rhyme and include a verb that more accurately portrays the application of suncream. But it isn’t. And even then…
5. ‘Wrap’ shouldn’t be in there at all. I don’t know who came up with this campaign, but I must assume it was someone who has never seen someone put on a t-shirt. You don’t wrap them. You can, if they’re massive t-shirts, but you won’t end up through any of the right holes. I’m not really sure what could be done about this, because “cover, smother, beaver” isn’t catchy or clear. Of course, they could always abandon the whole idea of using three similar-sounding words and do something that works.

There shouldn’t be five errors in what is essentially a three word campaign.

from: Doreen Brown (doreen_brown0@yahoo.co.in)
reply-to: doreenbrown0@gmail.com
to: taylor.andrew@gmail.com
date: 8 May 2008 16:01
subject: ENDEAVOUR

Dear Friend ,

Brief Introduction, Am Mrs Doreen Brown, 40years old, a citizen of United Kingdom , Secretary to Engr. Edward Bill, Uni Diamonds Inc London UK ..

I am soliciting for a dependable individual who will be able to handle multiple-tasks and will be well disposed towards work, with whom I can transact a well profitable business. Presently I have been assigned on a project to search for a product called CRYSTALLITE MULTI-CLEANSER-xhg.

The Crystallite multi-cleanser-xhg is a new scientific chemical fluid substance manufactured in North Korea , is of lubricant mainly used in the Gemological Laboratory for the purification of diamonds, clarity treatment, its penetrate deep into diamond and vaporizes out black inclusion in diamonds and other precious stones listed below:-

(1)both blue and colorless)

(2)Mr. Clay Wilson president.Since 1977 Uni Diamonds Inc.

This product are rare and in high demand here in Britain, though not long it came to existence, it was introduce to our Company by a Chinese friend, Mrs. Liz Wong, a gemologist in Canada, who gave me a sample for text on my last visit to Canada.
In a moment, I have searched to a conclusive point, that this said product are specifically found in the Asian Regions in which We can purchase a large amount for supply, at an affordable price in Taiwan and Malaysia by a reputable dealer.

The management of Uni Diamond has being mandated to come over to Asia to purchase the product mentioned above, but the issue right now is that I need the correspondence of a reliable partner just as I said earlier on, who will stand as the distributor.
The actual selling price from the dealers in Asia is (GBP £1,500) per pack-equivalent (USD $2,829.00), While is sold here in Britain at the rate of (GBP £3,500) to Gemological Companies.

Meanwhile I don,t want our marketing manager to go directly to the dealers, because I have quoted the cost to be (GBP £2,700), per pack-equivalent (USD $5,092.00) and the management agreed with the offered price.

My appeal to you is for your assistance, to get the product from the dealers then sale to our Company at the stipulated price as stated above, thereafter the profit will be shared base on percentage.

The management is willing to purchase (Minimum of 15packs and maximum of 30packs) huge profit. Well it will be my pleasure to handle this transaction with you, note that the transaction will continue pending on your co-operation towards this first deal.

Best Regards,

Mrs Doreen Brown

Of course I was thrilled.

Doreen Brown! Wow, I’m such a huge fan! I loved the thing you did where you got that guy to dream something then built it around him only it was real. How did you do that? Is it all just faked?

Andrew

419 scammers do not listen to me.

Dear Andrew Taylor,

In response to your question, the Crystallite multi-cleanser-xhg is a new scientific chemical fluid substance manufactured in North Korea , it’s of lubricant mainly used in the Gemological Laboratory for the purification of diamonds, clarity treatment, it penetrates deep into diamond and vaporizes out black inclusion in diamonds and other precious stones.
The supplier is currently living in Malaysia. I am leaking this secret to you for our mutual benefit. It’s a deal. The actual selling price from the dealer in Asia is GBP £1,500 per pack-equivalent USD $2,829.00, While it’s sold here in Britain at the rate of GBP £3,500 to Gemological Companies.

Meanwhile I don’t want our marketing manager to go directly to the dealers, because I have quoted the cost to be GBP £2,700, per pack-equivalent USD $5,092.00 and the management agreed with the offered price.

Having said much, base on how i got your contact and other relevant information about you,it was when i was making a rigoriuos inquiry about a competent and trust worthy personality in your country as a result of my quest i found out that your personality could be deemed necessary to carry out this deal diplomatically.However feel free to ask whatever you consider being asked.

All I need from you is to raise some capital and secure the product from the seller before the arrival of the Purchasing Manager. I will give you contact details of the seller if you indicate your interest in this business.
I intend to be a sole distributed of the company after my resignation comes December this year and would want us to work as partners in future.

Thanks for understanding and anticipated maximum cooperation.

Best Regards,

Mrs Doreen Brown

Her variety of fonts is clearly impressive.

Hi Doreen,

That’s amazing.

Is the $2829 in banknotes, or that funny blank money you used that time? I loved that the jewellers took it but that hot dog seller didn’t. That was great.

Andrew

I never got a reply. I can only suppose that I wasn’t suggestible enough for her trick to work.

Now, to go and dig up the second one…

No. Not really.

On Tuesday I got a second email, saying that in fact they weren’t going to do that.

Dear Mr Taylor

Thank you for requesting redelivery of your item.

I am sorry to inform you that the delivery office cannot take your item to the post office you requested, as it is out of their area/is not able to receive these items.

Please note if your item is a Special Delivery we are only able to redeliver to either the address held on the item or a Post Office that accepts this service.

Please can you re-submit your request for redelivery to your home address free of charge, an alternative address or Post Office within the same postcode area as the original delivery address.

The Post Office we’d originally requested (and they’d “confirmed” it would be delivered to) was technically in a different postcode area to my flat — by what must be all of one hundred yards — and was quite happy to hold onto Mariokart Wii when that was too big for our letterbox, although that was three weeks ago, and that’s a long time in the postal service (unless you go second class).

The email said I needed information from the little red card. This was impossible because my flatmate had picked it up by mistake and I didn’t know where it was. Instead, I phoned them up and explained the problem, and they were happy to redeliver the package to any Post Office I cared to nominate — providing it was in one of two postcode areas chosen apparently at random. Neither one was convenient, but they refused to back down, so I had to make do. They said I could pick it up on Thursday. That’s hardly ideal; it’s now taking four days to get a package from their own delivery office, to their own post office, in the same town. For an organisation whose only function is to move objects around the country, that’s a bit shit. It also raises the question of what would happen if I posted a large package to the Varsity flats in the same building as the Post Office. Presumably they would be willing to redeliver to the flats there for zero pence, but would refuse to accept fifty pence to deliver to their own office on the same street.

I did suggest that they opened the package and post the individual books through the letterbox, as they’d all fit fairly easily, but they said they couldn’t do that either. Apparently there are rules against that.
So yesterday, Thursday, I went to a poxy little shop that had a Post Office instead of a back wall. All very quaintly medieval. There was an Islamic sticker above the window, which isn’t remotely appropriate for a publicly owned body, and downright perverse considering it’s the Royal Mail and most of the royals are at least nominally Church of England. I explained who I was and what had happened, and he got the package down from a shelf.

Then he put it back up again and said that I couldn’t have it without the card. By this point he was basically just teasing me.

Well. I was at most half-sure I knew where the card was, but I wasn’t totally convinced there was any way for me to get it and in any case I was not going to go there again: it’s a long way from my flat to the random assortment of Post Offices that have the facility to accept incoming mail — I don’t mean to overstate this point, but that’s a facility which my flat has and is the sole purpose of the Royal Mail’s existence. So I explained to him that I wasn’t told I’d need the card, and I didn’t have the card and it was impossible for me to ever get the card, and he shrugged and looked at me in that way that people behind counters have that means “not my problem mate”, and I think he thought I’d leave. The fool.

I continued to stand there, and I gave him my look that means “if you want to serve the woman behind me then it has just become your problem”, and I don’t know how much of that came across, but he had a bit of a think and after a while he got a bit of paper, wrote down that I’d took the package, and made me sign it, and gave me the package — after checking my ID against my driver’s license. (On a similar topic, a sign next to the window listed acceptable types of ID for some service or other, and one of them was “full (not provisional) driver’s license”. That’s crazy. There are no extra ID checks between them. Essentially, they were basing their assessment of your identity on your ability to drive.) Presumably if someone else had come the day after with the little card he’d have shown them the paper, said “you collected it yesterday, look, I have a signed bit of paper to prove it” and given them his “not my problem” look. I realise now I’m criticising both of his available options, but the point is really that he should never have ended up in that position, not least because if they’d just been a bit more persistent with the intercom they’d have been able to hand the thing over in person on Monday — there was someone in.

All of this took most of the week, involved a long walk, and cost me an extra fifty fucking pence. I know that’s a pathetic amount of money but I very much resent being charged extra for all this extra hassle. That guy was lucky I didn’t have much copper on me.

And they have the nerve to call this their “local collect service”. At least two of those words are lies.

So again I ask: why should I care if they close a load of local Post Offices if they’re not going to use the ones they’ve got?

I can’t imagine what part of this anything thinks is remotely acceptable.

I think this could catch on. It is becoming increasingly clear that I am a marketing genius.

A few hours later, this arrives in my Google Reader feed, via the BBC:

Satellite could plummet to Earth

No details of the satellite were given

A “large” US spy satellite has gone out of control and is expected to crash to Earth some time in late February or March, government sources say.

Officials speaking on condition of anonymity said the satellite had lost power and propulsion, and could contain hazardous materials.

The White House said it was monitoring the situation.

A spokesman said “numerous” satellites had come out of orbit and fallen back to Earth harmlessly over the years.

How great is that?

What the fuck is a “Quantum of Solace”?

Bond films are meant to be called short snappy things like “Thunderball” or “Moonraker”, phrases with the word ‘die’ shoehorned into them, like “Live and Let Die” or “Die Another Day”, or something like “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” or “Casino Royale” that’s just jam-packed with Bond imagery. Or anything with gold. They could have called it “Die in the Springtime” or “One Shot Kill” or “Goldmaster” or anything.

Quantum of Solace, indeed… I never heard of such a thing.

Pah.

The aim of golf is to get the ball in a very small indentation.
It’s proving very popular as a means of recreation.
You even get a little car to save perambulation.

Sherlock Holmes was very good at crime investigation.
He almost always used the process of elimination
To figure out, beyond all doubt, who did the perpetration.

Daleks represent the Kaled race’s last mutation.
Their stock-in-trade is murder which they call ‘extermination’.
They were designed inside the mind of Mr Terry Nation.

Science has given us more effective medication.
There’s no risk of autism from the MMR vaccination.
That was the conclusion of The Cochrane Collaboration.

A problem is termed complex if its time of computation
Grows exponentially with a parameter’s alteration.
And it looks best when it’s expressed using big-‘O’ notation.

So why the hell is the song still nonsense?

From now on, when I see this kind of thing, I am going to ask the question that is in my head, because I don’t like the feeling that there’s a good explanation that I don’t have. It’s like if you’ve set the video to record Jonathan Creek and it didn’t finish on time.

The moment it arrived, the whole memory came flooding back, of course, which is good because it saved my trying the thing again. And to be honest, I’m not sure I could have usefully described it even if I had remembered it sooner: it’s unlike everything. I could no more describe it succinctly than I could describe the colour green to a blind man. (I mean a man blind from birth — the blind, not being insane, don’t insist on a capitalisation to distinguish congenital and acquired disability.)

I’m told it’s made with red beans. These, I surmise, are the brown gooey filling — presumably the eponymous mud. I can only guess that this is smeared onto the squishy grey gel that forms what I assume is the “donkey”. This stuff tastes of nothing very much, and it looks like a grey gel. The closest substance in the realm of normal human experience (if you exclude the Chinese, and how many of them can there possibly be?) is probably snot, the main difference being that some people eat snot. A more similar, but less well-known, substance is the stuff they put on cheap action figures to allow them to flip down walls — sticky enough to cling but not enough to bear its own weight for long.

This whole thing starts to resemble something that was squeezed out of a spot on one of the noses on Mount Rushmore, and so to stop it looking quite so gross it’s sprinkled with something brown and vaguely unpleasant, which clings to the tacky white mush in little clumps. The best word to describe it is “encrusted”, and not in the “diamonds” way.

The experience of eating one is very strange. It doesn’t actively taste bad, but then, it tastes so decidedly unlike anything you’ve ever eaten that it takes you several bites to realise that it’s gross, and all through that time you have to put up with the texture, which is how I imagine eating wet blu-tack must feel. When you bite through it, sometimes the bean goo moves around, and the layers of gel touch. When this happens, the layers merge. It seems you cannot have two blocks of gel touching any more than you can have two holes touching: you have one big one.

I assume the ridiculous name is there to get people curious about it. I suspect the Chinese characters next to it say “this is not a dessert — it is just a trick to see what the locals will eat”. What I’m trying to say is: if you’re ever curious, don’t indulge that curiosity. The curiosity is more enjoyable than the equivalent dessert.

I’ve seen twelve people try Donkey Rolled In Mud. Based on that experience, you have a one in twelve chance of liking it.