Friday, December 18, 2020

Stupid Mail Got Thorugh The Filters Again - They Must Get Leaky Over Time

I cannot write in English because of the treacherous spelling.

Albert Einstein


Yeah, I did misspell "Austen" having long known a family in town who spells it "Austin". But did you know that ol' Jane, most famous for created shallow characters who are about as deep as the kind of sorority gals who go to school for the sole purpose of getting their MRS, was notoriously bad at the standard spelling of the English language? Her name repeatedly appears on lists of famous writers who were notorious for their "bad spelling". 

 

Faulkner, Hemingway, Keats, Fitzgerald, Yeats, Emily Dickinson, are writers I've seen brought up on their "bad spelling". If you are stupid enough to believe the "hand D" section of the mish-mosh of a play marketed as the one and only evidence that the Stratford guy ever wrote anything but his name (which he never managed to spell the same way twice) you'd certainly have to add William Shakespeare to that list, the spelling in it is all over the place.  One of the whoppers of a lie told to link him to it is based in misspelling, though when that is investigated objectively, the argument is inconclusive at best and when objective experts look into it, the case totally falls apart.

 

Not to mention Thomas Jefferson who once said he didn't have any use for a man who knew only one way to write a word. I have certainly been critical of Jefferson the slave holding hypocrite but not on count of his spelling or even, much, on what I think is rather evident that a lot of the time he was pretty drunk while he wrote.


If I thought it would help me write as well as Dickinson,Keats, Faulkner or Yeats I'd let my spelling go completely to orthographic hell.   A knack for visual memory and guess work, which is all "correct spelling" indicates is a rather minor skill though one given completely outsized repute by mid-brows.  The greatest writers of the English language haven't had it in any greater percentage than the general population, lots of useless scribblers have it.  I suspect that's the basis of many a scribbling class hack's life choice.   Doesn't make what they say worth reading.

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