... that is the question. Ken Smith, Senior Lecturer in Bucks University, argues that we should accept commonly misspelt words as 'variant spellings':
"Just spell it like it is
7 August 2008
Don't let students' howlers drive you mad, says Ken Smith. Accept their most common mistakes as variant spellings ... and relax
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.
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"?
As a starting point, may I suggest the following ten candidates, which are based on the most commonly misspelt words by my students:
- Arguement for argument. Why do we drop the "e" in argument (and in judgment) but not in management? We do not pronounce "argument" "ar-gum-ent", so why should we spell it this way?
- Febuary for February (and Wensday for Wednesday). We spell the word "February" the way we do only because it is taken from the Latin word februa, the Roman festival of purification. Similarly, the "correct" spelling of the word "Wednesday" comes from the Old English Wodnes daeg, or Woden's day. But why should we still pay homage today to a pagan god or a Roman festival of purification?
- Ignor for ignore. The word "ignore" comes from the Latin ignorare meaning "to know" and ignarus meaning "ignorant". Neither of these words has an "e" after the "r", so why do we?
- 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?
- Opertunity for opportunity. This looks odd, but in fact we only spell "opportunity" as we do because in Latin this word refers to the timely arrival at a harbour - Latin portus. However in Latin this word is spelt obportus not opportus, so, if we were being consistent, we should spell "opportunity" as "obportunity".
- Que for queue, or better yet cue or even kew. Where did we get the second "ue" in the word "queue"? Its etymology is obscure. But, etymology or not, why do we need it?
- Speach for speech. We spell "speak" with an "ea". We do not have to but we do. Since we do, let us then spell "speech" with an "a" too, to coincide with the spelling of the words "peach", "preach" and "teach". Both words come from the same origin - the Old English spechan - which, therefore, does not support either the "ea" or "ee" spelling.
- Thier for their (or better still, why not just drop the word their altogether in favour of there?). It does not make any difference to the meaning of a sentence if you spell "their" as "thier" or "there", and the proof of this is that you are always able to correct this. "Thier" would also be consistent with the "i" before "e" rule, so why do you insist on "their"?
- 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"?
- Twelth as twelfth. The "f" word. How on earth did that "f" get in there? The answer is Old English again: twelf is related to the Frisian tweli, but why should we care? You would not dream of spelling the words "stealth" or "wealth" with an "f" in them (as "stealfth" and "wealfth") so why insist on putting the "f" in "twelfth"?
I could go on and add another ten words that are commonly misspelt - the word "misspelt" itself of course, and all those others that break the "i" before "e" rule (weird, seize, leisure, neighbour, foreign etc) - but I think I have made my point.
Either we go on beating ourselves and our students up over this problem or we simply give everyone a break and accept these variant spellings as such.
Remember, I am not asking you to learn to spell these words differently. All I am suggesting is that we might well put 20 or so of the most commonly misspelt words in the English language on the same footing as those other words that have a widely accepted variant spelling."
12 comments:
If he's arguing for a general spelling reform of English, he might be intellectually consistent, and even have a point - except that it's never worked in the past and I can't see it happening now.
But this sounds much more like a post-modernist, non-judgemental world view, in which all variation between all people (white European males usually excepted) is equally "valid" and where any attempt to "teach" our poor little darlings will cause irreparable harm to their tender souls.
Plus which it would be even MORE unworkable than a general spelling reform, such as they did in Germany recently, which generally replaced ONE old spelling for a word with ONE new spelling, and was based on the idea of spelling following grammatical rules, not allowing for differences in pronunciation. And it was still a nightmare for teachers - you had to mark essays in multiple colours, to show what counted as an error under old, and what under new rules (during the transition period anyway).
This guy is advocating multiple (arbitrarily picked) spellings for (an arbitrary number of) 20 (arbitrarily picked) words. There's no way such a system could be implemented by teachers, even assuming any of them would bother to try. And since pronunciation constantly changes, presumably there'd be regular rounds of spelling changes in the future.
I once worked in an HR dept which was deluged with CVs. My job was to find *any* excuse to throw 99.9% of them in the bin. The slightest spelling mistake was such an excuse. I pity the poor fools who study under teachers like this guy and find their way in the world blocked by their stunted excuse of an education.
PS See the extensive comments at the original article.
The bloke is quite right, even though he's not from a real university :-)
Shakespeare didn't spell his name in the same way in any of the variant extant signatures attributed to him. It's not damn well important, so long as the meaning is clear... and it usually is from context, even when there is a possibility of ambiguity from the spelling itself.
We have little difference distinguishing between furniture polish and eastern European Polish, or the present tense and the command to present arms.
It's virtually an irrelevance to the quality and significance and creativity of the written content. Spelling is not so important... get over it.
JP is right to mention the comments on the original article. I thought this one was good:
# Alex D 7 August, 2008
According to Dr Smith here, "it does not make any difference to the meaning of a sentence if you spell 'their' as 'thier' or 'there'."
Oh really? How about "Let's shoot there son" versus "Let's shoot their son"?
Frank Furedi, Marxist libertarian writer and Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, strongly disagrees with the original piece:
"Many of us have had our Dan Quayle moment; we’re capable of making some highly embarrassing spelling mistakes.
Yet according to the proponents of the ‘New Literacy’, when the former American vice president ‘corrected’ a school pupil’s spelling of ‘potato’ to ‘potatoe’ during a school spelling bee, he was simply practising the art of ‘variant spelling’. Many educators now consider the teaching of Correct Spelling as an elitist imposition that discriminates against the disadvantaged, or, in the case of Quayle, against those who have had a literacy-bypass.
Those of us who work in universities are used to reading essays by students who have liberated themselves from the oppressive regime of good grammar and spelling. Some of us still bother to correct misspelled words; others have become tired and indifferent to the problem of poor spelling.
Now, an academic has come up with an interesting compromise. Ken Smith, a criminologist at Bucks New University, England, argues that we should chill out and accept the most common spelling mistakes as ‘variant spellings’.
‘University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell’, he argued recently in the Times Higher Education Supplement. That would mean treating ‘truely’ as the equivalent of ‘truly’ and possibly ‘potatoe’ as a variant of ‘potato’. In this way, academics would save themselves a lot of grief and incidentally – or incidently – rehabilitate Dan Quayle’s reputation.
At first sight, Smith’s proposal appears as a sensible and pragmatic response to the problem of poor spelling. He is not arguing for abandoning the rules of spelling, only for taking a relaxed attitude towards a relatively small number of commonly misspelled words. Unfortunately, in today’s philistine intellectual climate, this pragmatic response can only end up legitimising poor standards of literacy. Taking an eclectic approach towards the rules of spelling would send the signal that how words are written is negotiable, even unimportant. Once variant spelling becomes acceptable for some commonly misspelled words, the list will grow and grow.
My principal objection to ‘variant spelling’ is that it reinforces the pernicious idea that children and young people today cannot be expected to meet the difficult challenge of learning how to use language correctly. For some time now, influential educators have asked whether it is desirable to teach children correct spelling. Some pedagogues argue that teaching spelling is a waste of time that serves no positive purpose. Others claim that an insistence in the classroom on spelling everything correctly frustrates those who suffer from learning disabilities and dyslexia. So-called progressive educators have even suggested that the promotion of spelling is an elitist enterprise that discriminates against young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
In some cases, illiteracy has been turned into a virtue. I have been told by some experts that using punctuation is an arbitrary way of organising words. Apparently the insistence on ‘correct’ spelling inhibits creativity and stigmatises the self-expression of minority groups in particular. George Turnbull, described by BBC News as ‘the exam doctor at the UK Qualifications and Curriculum Authority’, has argued that: ‘Shakespeare could survive without spelling well - although he did have a lot of other things going for him.’ (1) So if Shakespeare could not spell, there is little point in insisting that children learn this apparently unimportant skill. It is sad that Shakespeare is now called upon to condone the failures of contemporary schooling.
In essence, variant spelling is a true companion to the idea of variant truths. Contemporary cultural life has become estranged from the idea of Truth with a capital T. In academia, social scientists never tire of informing students that there are no ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers. Instead of the truth, people are exhorted to accept different perspectives as representing many truths.
The demotion of the status of truth calls into question the purpose of gaining knowledge. Celebrating variant truths, like variant spellings, is presented as a pluralistic gesture of tolerance. In fact it represents a reluctance to take education and its ideas seriously. And not surprisingly, those who do not take ideas seriously are also not very worried about how they are spelled."
Re: Wembley's comment above, I note with interest that it is just about the first one ever from that source that is correctly spelled... ;-)
I'm also curious to know whether he has this lack of interest in the spelling ability of the office workers he employs.
This just in:
Let pupils abandon spelling rules, says academic
To which I can only say "Bollox!"
Those interested in this topic are invited to have a go at Harrow's literacy test for pupils entering 6th Form.
Harrow School, lower sixth literacy test (one hour)
Seems a decent test, though some of the answers are wrong (or at least, some of the supposedly wrong answers are right).
JP said...
"Seems a decent test, though some of the answers are wrong (or at least, some of the supposedly wrong answers are right)."
Enlighten us, JP. Enquiring minds want to know...
Councils ban use of latin et cetera, et cetera ...
"Local authorities have ordered employees to stop using the words and phrases on documents and when communicating with members of the public and to rely on wordier alternatives instead.
The ban has infuriated classical scholars who say it is diluting the world's richest language and is the "linguistic equivalent of ethnic cleansing".
Bournemouth Council, which has the Latin motto Pulchritudo et Salubritas, meaning beauty and health, has listed 19 terms it no longer considers acceptable for use.
This includes bona fide, eg (exempli gratia), prima facie, ad lib or ad libitum, etc or et cetera, ie or id est, inter alia, NB or nota bene, per, per se, pro rata, quid pro quo, vis-a-vis, vice versa and even via.
Its list of more verbose alternatives, includes "for this special purpose", in place of ad hoc and "existing condition" or "state of things", instead of status quo.
In instructions to staff, the council said: "Not everyone knows Latin. Many readers do not have English as their first language so using Latin can be particularly difficult."
The details of banned words have emerged in documents obtained from councils by the Sunday Telegraph under The Freedom of Information Act.
Of other local authorities to prohibit the use of Latin, Salisbury Council has asked staff to avoid the phrases ad hoc, ergo and QED (quod erat demonstrandum), while Fife Council has also banned ad hoc as well as ex officio."
Not sure if this is the right thread, but here goes:
as you'll know, I've vigorously defended the academic grading system agaist charges of dumbing down, but I'm an arts grad, so I can only comment knowledgeably on the subjects I know...
...so I asked a couple of jobbing scientists whether A levels in science were getting easier, and the ancecdotal consensus was: they are.
These were their observations:
Combined science GCSEs are pointless, meaning kids go into A level with no grounding;
So A levels have to be easier, because the kids can't catch up, even if they are rigorously tested starting from a lower entry level;
to the extent that undergrads don't have sufficient grounding in their subjects;
such that almost all undergrad science degrees are now 4 year courses, with the first year bringing them up to old A level standards;
and with the futher complication that modular courses at GCSE and A level have left the kids with very poor long-term recall... they can acquire a knowledge base, but they easily forget it when they do the next thing.
I am bowing to superior knowledge on this... perhaps the science disciplines ARE now less rigorous, and therefore the respective grades are much higher and progressively meaningless.
These scientist mates DID say that the current immediately-postgrad generation are great at analysing and evaluating stuff... which in some measure supports my contention that arts disciplines have become 'harder', in that they are more about analytical reasoning rather than rote learning. But this doesn't at all defend the current teaching and examination of the sciences.
Very interesting ancecdotal evidence from Wembley. Particularly commendable of you to post it when it runs counter to your own position. I salute you sir!
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