Waah!!! Spelling is too hard!!

When the world is made to be idiot-proof, the world will become overpopulated with idiots. - Mark Twain

Linky

But spelling bee protesters? They're out here, too.

Four peaceful protesters, some dressed in full-length black and yellow bee costumes, represented the American Literacy Council and the London-based Spelling Society and stood outside the Grand Hyatt on Thursday, where the Scripps National Spelling Bee is being held. Their message was short: Simplify the way we spell words.

Roberta Mahoney, 81, a former Fairfax County, Va. elementary school principal, said the current language obstructs 40 percent of the population from learning how to read, write and spell.

Why people need to keep lowering the bar rather than raising it is beyond me. Memory skills are very important to learn and that's something spelling helps with, JMO

My brother saw an interview with a guy who wrote a book on the complexity of the English language. A lot of the spellings that are odd to us have something to do with the early printing presses. A problem with the early printing presses was that letters would bleed over and some spellings had to be made so a word would be legible after printing.

ok did i read that right? we have to dumb down the english language?

i've heard it all now.

Yes, English is complex. Yes, there are spelling oddities and various pronunciations for the same group of letters: cough, tough, through, though, bough, rough, etc. The majority of us have learned them.

It's also true that English speakers around the word use different spellings for the same words: endeavor - endeavour, color - colour, etc., but we manage.

Other languages have specific ways to spell their words. Has anyone heard of Spanish, French, Russian, etc., spelled any which way? Of course not.

Methinks the protesters aren't satisfied we rank pretty far down on the intelligence ladder compared to the rest of the world, they want us at the very bottom. :banghead: How utterly foolish of them. Have they nothing constructive to do? They'd rather waste time campaigning for for an even more illiterate USA. :banghead: Why bother to send our children to school?

I see lots of misspellings and misuse of words on the internet (possessive instead of plural forms (Callahan's rather than Callahans), "prolly instead of the correct "probably", "should of" instead of "should have"..... Do they really want us to be more careless with our spelling? :nerves:

I have to admit, my possessive plurals are not what they should be...but I can still diagram the heck out of a sentence. In my line of work you must know the quote unquote King's English, because you will look like a huge donkey butt if you don't.

However...I love watching the spelling bee! Our Blackhawks are on tonight, but I'm still flipping over to the Bee, and checking the score of the hockey during breaks. Those kids work hard to learn and they all should be rewarded, not told that they shouldn't bother because learning should be more 'simple'.

Check out this site for some funny spelling poetry:
http://www.spellingsociety.org/news/media/poems.php

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it's said like bed, not bead -
For goodness sake don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose -
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart -
Come, come, I've hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I'd mastered it when I was five!


Quoted by Vivian Cook and Melvin Bragg 2004,
by Richard Krogh, in D Bolinger & D A Sears, Aspects of Language, 1981,
and in Spelling Progress Bulletin March 1961, Brush up on your English.

Click to expand...

There are plenty of languages in which the phoneme-grapheme correspondences are much more straightforward than in English and I don't think the speakers of those languages are necessarily any dumber for it but it would be pretty hard to organize a spelling reform because there would be so much to change and it would have to be taught to so many people.