Several people around here have noted that this is the worst allergy season in memory and my allergies are many and severe, one of the blessings of living to get old. Or so I'm told. I will try to write something sufficiently startling and, perhaps, original to satisfy anyone who might come here for that, it's not that I'm not having ideas, it's that I'm too exhausted to write them out.
As to the tempest in a toss pot that my answer about the stupidity of the standardized spelling of the English language set off and, since the snobs will cow people into not adopting even the moderate and realistic original proposals that many have advocated, I have decided to, again, favor a return to non-standardized spelling.
Here is a footnote from Noah Webster's* interesting and, with some reservations, excellent 1789 An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages and Practicability of Reforming the Mode of Spelling, and of Rendering the Orthography of Words Correspondent to Pronunciation, proving that the original American genius, Benjamin Franklin had the same position I've adopted.
I once heard Dr. Franklin remark, "that those people spell best, who do not know how to spell," that is, they spell as their ears dictate, without being guided by rules, and thus fall into a regular orthography.
As I pointed out last weekend, Americans who sneer at spelling reform, using the standardized American spelling stupidly advocate what was presented, by Noah Webster as a spelling reform, himself noting the frequent stupidities to be found in the font of standardized Brit spelling, Samuel Johnson's mish mosh of a dictionary. I was surprised reading Webster's essay how much was known of how the defects of English spelling came into use, the fact that in the early days of printing most of the printers and typesetters were Dutch and introduced lots of the silent letters that vex so many writers of English, now. On top of that there was the late Renaissance - "Enlightenment" practice of snobs trying to introduce supposed Latin and Greek spelling into English words which, in many cases, were not derived from their supposed classical language false friends. Not to mention other sources for some of the worst problems. The idea that the written form of a language should be deformed out of any practical practice in the interest of alleged etymological erudition is about the stupidest idea ever to gain any kind of a foothold in any alleged intellectual establishment. That alone would justify We The People taking it back from the snobs and claiming our right to the written language.
But to hell with all that, if the snobs won't give up their petty skill - which, by the way, many of the forsworn enemies of spelling reform haven't really mastered, themselves - I advocate that the rest of us just follow Benjamin Franklin's words and spell however the hell we think best. Even the best sort of standard spellers have better manners and more wisdom than to despise someone who uses a different spelling, especially if they use the word according to its meaning.
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And, just to piss off those I'd find it most satisfying to like to piss off in my bad mood, the observation about the corruptions of English spelling introduced by the early print shops and publishers more or less render the arguments about the "hand D" manuscript of Thomas More being by the Stratford man, as put forward by the "Birthplace Trust" and the British Library, of entirely unknown but almost certainly vanishingly improbable import. There is no way to know how any variant spelling in a print source in the Tudor-Jacobean period came into being, how faithfully the print setter followed the hand written copy which, itself, could be a copy by someone not the author. Just thought I'd throw that in to annoy the trolls.
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