INTERNET PHONETICS | 2007-02-07
You may note that I don't correct spelling errors of commenters. That is because, in my opinion, the Internet is producing phonetic English. I do not remember the last time I had any difficulty understanding, even reading at full speed, what a commenter was talking about.
In England, the purpose of language is largely to tell you what claaaahss a person is. Among the colonials over here, spelling tells you whether a person is educated in terms of our established religion. Many and many a PC cannot think, but by God he can SPELL.
This impresses me the same way a lawyer in a black dress or a drunk in a costume impresses me. But I am not alone. I remember that ten or twelve years ago, there were regular complaints in the chatrooms and Newsgroups about someone's spelling. Now I don't see ANY of that.
We may be solving a problem the English-speaking world has had for centuries. And it is a problem people like me have all the time: I want to see how a word is spelled, but I can't look it up because it is in alphabetical order and I can't FIND it because I can't SPELL it.
If you are Buckley and you get PAID for not thinking, all this and words no one else uses and untranslated French phrases are fun and impress the hell out of the illiterates in the press corps and on campus. But for those of us who specialize in THINKING words are just tools, and we do not want to read twelve pages of instructions before we put down what we are thinking.
Spelling, like English English, is a matter of claaahsss. You show you have gone to Cambridge or gotten a full dose of Mommy Professor here by repeating the spelling prescribed by some dictionary.
I consider myself an aristocrat, but the last reason for that is that I can lord it over comrades who don't spend their lives over a friggin' dictionary.
And PLEASE don't make the comment you would have made if I had never been born. READ what I wrote. Somebody is going to say, "But that way lies CHAOS!!!!" I started off by saying I have not had a single problem understanding what a person was saying because of his spelling.
That way lies sanity, not chaos.