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"Chuckle Stop!" Every now and again there is a debate in the media about correct spelling. Most linguists feel that people get too het up about spelling, though - Shakespeare was a 'free speller', after all, and he did OK. A nice example of a letter in this sort of debate, which demonstrates the opposite of what its writer seems to think it does, appeared in the Independent, 5th September 2002:
Quite funny but perfectly comprehensible none the less. But nonetheless, there are times when people who are not careful enough make themselves look a bit silly. A nice example (reported on BBC Radio 4 on 2 September 2002, in a programme discussing the effect of text messaging on the spelling of the young) was that of a young woman who, in writing about her flexibility in her application letter for a new post, said that in her current post she had 'filled many rolls'! Sometimes people get annoyed at the spelling of others,
of course. A nice example we know of, courtesy of an American linguist,
is that one of her undergraduate students became very angry about Mick
Short's book, 'Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose', because
it was full of mis-spellings. After she had fulminated at length about
academics and publishers who couldn't spell, her teacher then had to point
out to her that the American English and British English spelling systems
are not entirely the same!
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