World

English spelling seen as "truely atrosious"

by Dave Keating | August 7, 2008 at 02:41 am

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An academic in the UK has suggested that university professors being accepting variant spellings as legitimate, in light of the fact that spelling errors are growing more and more frequent in university courses. Some misspellings that he's suggested accepting include "ignor", "occured", "thier", "truely", "speach" and "twelth."

Embaressed by yor spelling? Never you mind.

Fed up with his students' complete inability to spell common English correctly, a academic has suggested it may be time to accept "variant spellings" as legitimate.

Rather than grammarians getting in a huff about "argument" being spelled "arguement" or "opportunity" as "opertunity", why not accept anything that's phonetically (fonetickly anyone?) correct as long as it can be understood?

"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," Ken Smith, a criminology lecturer at Bucks New University, wrote in the Times Higher Education Supplement.

"University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell."