Apathy Sketchpad

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.

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*And don’t trust me, either — my spelling is hardly great and I’m a scientist, not a language… er… guy. Make sure I provide examples.

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