spelling is overated
Fazackerly! Having been employed in the past as a publisher's reader and an exam reviser and examiner you internalize that style of reading and mistakes leap out at you. It's a bit like can swimming pool attendants ever have a relaxing beach holiday? I spent my career teaching comprehensive school kids that they too can read and understand Shakespeare, Catullus, Joyce, Marx and to drop the 'likes' and the sloppy speech. I could get away with it as an articulate cockney. Sloppy speech, spelling and grammar would only further disadvantage them in a class-ridden society. Oddly, when a strictly formal sentence comes into my head, so do ways of corrupting it with ambiguity, malapropisms and innuendo. Language is fun but only when you've mastered the rules so you know how they can be bent.
Speeling is important because it keeps in check the deviation from the agreed standard. If no-one attempted to speep correctly over time the speeppin would become so deviated from the accepted norm that no one would anymore be able to understand what it was that you were trying to apeep.
Like it or not, the acceptance of poor English language skills in education starts to swing the doors of various careers shut from an early age. Perhaps not as much as in former generations, but if you want children from less affluent backgrounds to have the same opportunities as others, then it makes sense to at least offer them the chance to succeed, even if they end up in a job which doesn't demand those qualities. It's the same principle as teaching maths to children at a higher level than the majority of jobs require. It preserves the opportunity for those who need it.
I spent my career teaching comprehensive school kids that they too can read and understand Shakespeare, Catullus, Joyce, Marx and to drop the ‘likes’ and the sloppy speech.
Sir, why is Joyce breaking all those rules you taught me? 🙂
The counter-argument is of course that a lot of the authors you teach were either less constrained by 'rules' at the time they were writing (Shakespeare, Chaucer etc), or chose to subvert them when it suited.
You could say that the current set state of grammar and spelling is a straitjacket on expression, and needs to be constantly tested so that language can evolve rather than be fixed in a corporately-acceptable form.
It is constantly evolving and is not a straightjacket and the writers who appeared in that contribution were simply people who we explored in different ways to uncover meaning and consider competing interpretations. I can't bear the formal pretentious crap my daughter has to teach, I was always on the look-out for a way in like, for example, the insults in Shakespeare's work. Get the kids laughing and you've got them on board.
our language as we know it now is a wide bastardised mix of Scandinavian, French, Britonic and middle/old English, with loads of others thrown in for measure.
This explains why we've mixtures of words with different etymologies and therefore multiple ways to spell them (bow, bough etc). But not why one way of spelling something is better than another. Bollocks to anyone who cites ambiguity. It you'd spelt 'cites' 'sights' or 'sites' in that sentence I'd have known what you mean, as I would have were you speaking.
Turkish, say, has complex roots with words a mixture of Arabic and Turkic, and was written in Arabic for hundreds of years, before they went over to roman script 90 or so years ago, with completely phonetic spelling, so spelling just isn't a thing. If you can speak you can spell (I taught there briefly so qualify to be on the thread).
That said, I always used to struggle with spelling when I was a kid though was otherwise good (annoyingly and precociously so) at English. Even now I'd not swear to how many 'n's ar in annoying. Whereas people like my wife honestly wonder why, if there's a right way to spell a word, you'd bother to spell it any other way.
No one has gone away and read Chomsky then? Or anyone else who's put the work in to help us understand why redundancy of letters when words are used in context is not a valid reason to abandon common ways of arranging letters to make words? People have spent their lives working on this stuff.
TLDR
Wh_le i_ i_ po__ible t_ under__and a sent__ce w_th mi__ing lett__s, th_t do_s n_t do aw_y wi_h the ne_d to h_ve a reasonably high volume of consistent spellings in our shared lexicon.
Bollocks to anyone who cites ambiguity. It you’d spelt ‘cites’ ‘sights’ or ‘sites’ in that sentence I’d have known what you mean, as I would have were you speaking.
Yes. But.
If you'd written "Bollocks to anyone who sights ambiguity" I'd have understood what you intended to say, but my brain would have initially tripped over your usage of the incorrect word. "You've seen... what... oh, 'cite,' right, of course." It changes the meaning of the sentence and makes for harder reading, it's a literal speed bump in your prose. "Sights" is no more valid here than saying "Bollocks to anyone who aardvarks ambiguity," the fact that it's a homophone doesn't give it validity. No what I mean?
It might be comprehensible but it's wrong and it pulls the reader out of the reading experience. It's like watching Downton Abbey and noticing that one of the maids is wearing a digital watch.
Yes. But.
If you’d written “Bollocks to anyone who sights ambiguity” I’d have understood what you meant to say, but my brain would have initially tripped over your usage of the wrong word. “You’ve seen… what… oh, ‘cite,’ right, of course.” It changes the meaning of the sentence and makes for harder reading, it’s a literal speed bump in your prose. “Sights” is no more valid here than saying “Bollocks to anyone who aardvarks ambiguity,” the fact it’s a homophone doesn’t give it validity. No what I mean?
It might be comprehensible but it’s wrong and it pulls the reader out of the reading experience. It’s like watching Downton Abbey and noticing that one of the maids is wearing a digital watch.
It requires subvocalisation (basically reading out loud in your head...) to understand that "sights" is actually "cites". That slows down reading, and needs a different part of the brain (we pretty much all subvocalise, but in varying amounts related to our reading ability but also the way we're reading what we're reading). It is, as Cougar says, understandable but it places the burden on the reader. Assuming the burden of getting it correct in the first place yourself is generally considered, I think, more respectful and therefore is "good behaviour".
Personally, I still think this is one of the big reasons why spelling/grammar matters, and certainly in some jobs etc would be frowned upon to expect the reader to sort out something that the author hasn't (bothered to?...).
Bollocks to anyone who aardvarks ambiguity
Or else I shall rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon,
See if I don't.
thymine or thiamine - spelling makes a difference (Biology teacher).
Or else I shall rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon,
See if I don’t.
I think I'd prefer the airlock.
This explains why we’ve mixtures of words with different etymologies and therefore multiple ways to spell them (bow, bough etc). But not why one way of spelling something is better than another
It's not better in the sense of being of a higher functional quality, it's just that it conforms to the conventions that other people use. It's like whether you drive on the left or the right - both work fine but they rely on everyone following the same convention. Minor transgressions aren't usually a problem - not indicating a left turn, for example - but if everyone just ignores the conventions, the system does start to break down. Employers want employees who can write formal correspondence, so being able to spell and punctuate is important if you want a white-collar job.
Here's an example of potential confusion. It's obvious this is a typo, "chanced" should be "changed", because the Tweet corrects it, but the story is related to statistics and odds (i.e. chances) so there's always a possibility that "chance" is used in some technical sense that laypeople aren't familiar with. Distracting when someone who makes their living as a writer is sloppy like this.
https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1319433722454790150
No one has gone away and read Chomsky then? Or anyone else who’s put the work in to help us understand why redundancy of letters when words are used in context is not a valid reason to abandon common ways of arranging letters to make words? People have spent their lives working on this stuff.
TLDR
Wh_le i_ i_ po__ible t_ under__and a sent__ce w_th mi__ing lett__s, th_t do_s n_t do aw_y wi_h the ne_d to h_ve a reasonably high volume of consistent spellings in our shared lexicon.
@kelvin, why would they have read Chomsky if they didn't know he had done some work in this field? And if they did, they probably didn't need to go away and re-read his stuff for the purposes of contributing to this thread. (Also, I believe thoughts have moved on since Chomsky's work, so there are probably more up-to-date sources to go to.) Why not give us a nice summary of the work that has been done, or point us in the direction of a handy summary of it, there probably is one on Wikipedia? That would be really helpful, because most of us are not sufficiently up with this to know what to search for and would struggle to get there using our own resources.
If you’d written “Bollocks to anyone who sights ambiguity” I’d have understood what you intended to say, but my brain would have initially tripped over your usage of the incorrect word.
I'm arguing against using multiple ways of spelling words that sound the same but mean different things. They manage to do this in plenty of other languages which are spelt phonetically. If they sound the same, spell them the same way. This would make reading and learning to read easier.
On the needing things to be spelt differently to understand them when reading at speed, I again call bollocks. This doesn't apply when you're listening to spoken language, and in written language homonyms are rarely going to trip anyone up. "She bit a bit of my skin, for a bit." Dunno where that came from. Also, puns.
I’ll often write “ont he” rather than my intended “on the” but I’ll go back and correct it.
I often write "a****s" instead of "accounts". That one really does need correcting!
It requires subvocalisation (basically reading out loud in your head…) to understand that “sights” is actually “cites”. That slows down reading, and needs a different part of the brain (we pretty much all subvocalise, but in varying amounts related to our reading ability but also the way we’re reading what we’re reading). It is, as Cougar says, understandable but it places the burden on the reader. Assuming the burden of getting it correct in the first place yourself is generally considered, I think, more respectful and therefore is “good behaviour”.
Couldn't agree more.
Or in modern parlance, this x1000.
It made sense to the author as they wrote it, but requires extra capacity from the reader to get the message as intended. Like people who type complex sentences with sub-clauses, colloquial expressions and exclamations thrown in, without a single piece of punctuation. You almost have to read it twice to get the message they were trying to convey.
Written English is not without its faults though. I'd love to see the upside down question mark that marks the begining of a Spanish sentence come to all languages for example.
A gender neutral term for the singular possesive would be useful, as would a plural "you" in common usage.
I often write “a****s” instead of “accounts”.
I once typed "public spending cu*ts" instead of "public spending cuts" when I was writing an undergraduate essay back in the days of manual typewriters. I couldn't be arsed to correct it seeing as it nicely summed up my opinion. Professor was slightly amused.
On the needing things to be spelt differently to understand them when reading at speed, I again call bollocks. This doesn’t apply when you’re listening to spoken language, and in written language homonyms are rarely going to trip anyone up. “She bit a bit of my skin, for a bit.” Dunno where that came from. Also, puns.
You can't hear as fast as you can read, and the brain processes the two things differently. Subvocalisation is more or less "hearing" - skim reading, without (or more correctly with little) subvocalisation is much faster but doesn't work for all cases.
“She bit a bit of my skin, for a bit.”
This is an example of a case where reading has to slow down to allow proper understanding. It's difficult to understand without "stopping on it" for a (short) while. Because of that, personally, I think that this is a poor sentence. "She bit some of my skin for a while" would be much clearer, can be read much faster and removes ambiguity and difficulty. Poor English isn't just poor spelling, and this is a case of a poorly constructed sentence for other reasons, and the points about where the burden lies apply just as much to this as they do to poor spelling.
Speaking of subvocalisation, have you tried working your way through Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks?
One of the most painful reading experiences I can remember, probably even overtaking Chaucer's 'Tales of Caunterbury'. I felt I had to finish it having bought the damn thing but it definitely wasn't one I'd recommend.
On the needing things to be spelt differently to understand them when reading at speed, I again call bollocks. This doesn’t apply when you’re listening to spoken language
But conversational language is two-way communication, there’s a margin for misunderstanding which can be easily clarified. You can adjust your delivery on the fly to fit your target audience, eg trying to soften broad Lancashire when speaking to Americans.
If you read something ambiguous you can’t ask a book what it meant, written English has to be held to a higher standard than conversational. Similarly, when (say) giving a presentation, you'd generally take more care over forming clear, understandable English than if you were telling someone about your sexual proclivities.
It's only one character in Feersum Endjinn as I recall, and while non-standard the spelling is consistent!
If you read something ambiguous you can’t ask a book what it meant,
They manage in phonetically spelt languages. Do you need a different spelling for "live" meaning will give you an electric shock, "live" meaning not recorded, "live" meaning reside?
Do you need a different spelling for “live” meaning will give you an electric shock
... potentially.
“live” meaning not recorded, “live” meaning reside?
That's actually a good example of where it should be spelt differently, they aren't homophones. Spoken they're clearly two different words, written they're ambiguous.
"I've seen Elvis live."
"Really?"
"Yeah, he was up partying all night, that boy really knew how to live."
See also, 'read.' I'm going to read this book, then once I've finished I'll have read it.
Standardised spelling makes it easier to read. I can (and did) read Iain Banks' Feersum Endjinn. After the first 100 pages I was quite comfortable with the phonetic spelling but I wouldn't want to have to do the same with every email, website, squirrel culling device instruction.
That’s actually a good example of where it should be spelt differently, they aren’t homophones. Spoken they’re clearly two different words, written they’re ambiguous
Should be? It isn't. Either way, you've just demonstrated that in practice your're fine with phonetic spelling.
