AS I HAVE WRITTEN about before, I'm not a huge fan of the standardized spelling of the English language which I think is more a blight than a virtue. Like most English speakers, even those with college-credentials and even many of those who you can call "college-educated" without stretching truth, I am not a master of that standardized spelling, or, rather of the American standard spelling, which would, if observed totally, would render them a "bad speller" in places which practice the English or Canadian rules for the same.
In researching this the last time my tireless little meter-maid of orthography got all schoolmarmish over my posts, I read some of Noah Webster's biography and writing on the topic and have to say that my view of him, which previously had been based on a 20th century bio for children I read in grade school, rose enormously. Here's just one of my more recent pieces on the topic. He would have been a far more radical reformer of spelling from the English system than the establishment of his time allowed him to be, democratizing the written language by getting rid of the "futile classicism" to a large extent and making the spelling far closer to phonetic spelling, even with the variations in pronunciation then current.
Democratizing and facilitating the written form of English is a vitally important thing if things are to get better. I know that after I learned to use a word processor and started typing (which I can do a hell of a lot faster than I could write with a pen) and I started typing out a lot of the notes I would have taken by hand and my thinking, it helped me to clarify a lot of things that I didn't realize were muddled before. That most English speaking people are inhibited from writing for any number of reasons - the other merely mechanical issue of (un)standardized punctuation of English being another of those - is a real danger, not only to personal memory and understanding but, also, in unreviewed thinking. I think one of the things that they could do to help that is to require students to type out something, anything important to them in school every day and to read it and edit it before some of them (chosen at random) had them read aloud to the class for criticism. Just requiring them to write and think about what they wrote would have an enormous effect in clarifying thinking and expression. If it would help, having them read it themselves might be good, though if someone has trouble doing that, they might need help on that count too.
I don't think there is any substitute for writing and reading text, words on a screen or on a page in semi-permanent form, easily edited and reviewable. I have come to deeply distrust extempore oral expression such as in presidential "debates" and interviews and question and answer sessions. Not everyone is as honest or as brilliant as Jen Psaki who might be the bst I've ever seen in that format. I'll bet she's a great writer, too.
An oral culture such as ours has become - even texting, tweeting and online commenting is more that than writing - is bound to have that be a problem for it. Memory failure, alone, is a guarantee if it's not written down and kept. Accurate memory seems to count for little to us resulting in a tsunami of lies, which is a big part of our problem. I'd illustrate with examples from my personal meter-maid of "correct writing" but I'm already spending more time with this than I'd intended to.
Failing the ever failing effort to "reform" the spelling of English, I say let's go back to the pre-Dr. Johnson time of unstandardized spelling being the standard. Many of the greatest works in the English language have that feature in the original manuscript AND IN THE ORIGINAL PRINT VERSIONS. In fact a lot of the worst of "correct spelling" of English were atrocities introduced because a lot of the printers in England at the time printing was introduced were imported from the Low Countries where such combinations as "eight" and ight" etc. were introduced. How stupid does an intellectual class have to be to allow such a thing to continue for so many centuries? Noah Webster's original reforms should be adopted but without that, let the chaos begin!
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This time it's over my intentionally annoying said troll with an intentional "misspelling" because the idiot let me know that really set him off. That one was intentional but another one came up unknowingly on my part when I copied what I have to believe was a Castilian writer writing it "Enrice Granados" using what I afterwards read was the way it was written where Granados lived in Barcelona while he used the more typically Spanish spelling "Enrique" which I have now changed that to. It wasn't something Simps noticed but I do respect Granados enough to change it to his spelling. Apparently people think it was something of a political thing as well, but that's their business, I'll concentrate on his music.
Update: Looking around, I saw some idiot writing for a well respected venue made light of one of the stories that claimed Amparo, Enrique Granados' wife was too fat to get into a life-boat, the implication that he should have just let her drown because, you know, she was fat. Which I think is one of the kind of disgusting things that is casually said that shows how vile contemporary speech is. The claims that Granados took the route home that ended up in getting them killed was due to him longing to be with his current mistress makes him risking and losing his life to save his wife, the mother of their six children all the more a testimony to his heroic death. Clearly, he loved her in ways that entirely go over the heads of such scribbling class wits for whom things like looks matter more than love and devotion, bravery and courage, the willingness to sacrifice yourself to save others, which is why such superficial asses should never be considered seriously or hired to write things.
If there's one thing I've learned from reading the reality behind some of our great wits, its remarkable how many of them were total scum and complete assholes. Especially those who write as "critics" of the popular variety.
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