Here's the main idea of an article that suggests better living through lower standards:
Fed up with his students' complete inability to spell common English correctly, a British 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."
To kickstart his proposal, Smith suggested 10 common misspellings that should immediately be accepted into the pantheon of variants, including "ignor," "occured," "thier," "truely," "speach" and "twelth" (it should be "twelfth").
No. No, no, no, no, no, no, NO.
2 comments:
Shouldn't that be, "Is it not bad enough"? LOL J/K. No, you're totally right; and I'm delighted to see something pertinent addressed on your blog. If that oaf is "fed up with his students'...inability", he should resign from his position. After all, what is his job? Is it not to teach them English? Fools of his caliber should be flayed alive rather than allowed to continue corrupting our youth. Actually, now that I think of it, his methods have already been put into practice in America. Certainly, no one is corrected or taught; no teacher takes a stand to establish what is accurate. Why, in seventh grade, I had an otherwise excellent teacher who refused-REFUSED-to pass judgment on the correct pronunciation of "often". Can you believe that?! I told her, "The 't' is silent, it always has been." My fellow (who had a passing interest in grammar and was a self-styled intellectual) insisted that because his family had always pronounced the 't', that was the only way to say the word. I told him that his family was illiterate. Our teacher would not take a side; on that day, I lost all respect for her. Language is vital; it is how we express our thoughts; for God's sake, we have no other means. I'm always stunned by people who write off spelling as unimportant. One must have a base; one must have a compass, and not only a moral compass, but an intellectual one as well. A teacher's job (his calling, supposedly) is to provide an intellectual compass for our youth;
anyone who denies this is a scoundrel, and should be driven from the town. I hope you will deign to publish this particular comment, as it pertains to a subject that is very dear to me; all people should be aware of the destruction of the mind that is being wrecked around them. All people should be aware.
An American English prof whose blog I read agrees with you and posted the same article. But he also has a link to another article, perhaps more mind-blowing.
Everybody seems to have forgotten than not that long ago, we didn't have spelling conventions and it was a weird free-for-all out there. That's why conventions were invented!
Post a Comment