Schools to rethink ‘i before e’
The spelling mantra “i before e except after c” is no longer worth teaching, according to the [English] government
And here I wrote:
Except of course, it’s not a grammatical rule, it’s a spelling rule. The most important, and apparently overlooked, comment in the article was Jack Bovill’s , “… it would be helpful if spelling were allowed to evolve.”
This idea that there’s only one way to spell a word is absurd, and really quite new. Most attribute our bizarre fondness for a fixed and immutable language (in the face of so much contrary evidence) to Samuel Johnson, whose dictionary was sponsored by publishers interested in the cost savings offered by a normalized spelling.
“It would be helpful if spelling were allowed to evolve.”
— Jack Bovill, 2009 —
“People think that just because you don’t spell well, you’re dumb.
What kind of people? Smart-alecky people who can’t think of but one way to spell a word, that’s who. That’s not spelling, it’s a failure of the imagination.”
— Donald Kaul, writing for the St. Petersburg Evening Independent – July 3, 1986 —
“My spelling is Wobbly. It’s good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.”
— A. A. Milne, 1926 —
“A man must be a great fool who can’t spell a word more than one way.”
— Marshall Brown, “Wit and Humor” (1880) —
“I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.”
— Possibly misattributed to Mark Twain. —
“Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays.”
— George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1872 —
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