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Even the people of England can't always get the King's English right. One British intellectual seems to have given up on asking people to spell certain words correctly.
It's not every day that I get to give an impromptu spelling bee to people walking the streets of Salt Lake City, especially since I'm no master speller myself.
I used the same words recently illustrated in a Reuter's article. They were words like ignore, truly, speech and twelfth. A British lecturer says he sees these words misspelled so often, he thinks ignor, truely, thier, arguement, opertunity, speach, occured, misspelt, varient and twelth should be accepted as "variant spellings" as long as people can understand them.
People I spoke with said, "Huh?"
One man said, "It's just an excuse for being lazy, and you don't learn the spellings for the correct words."
A Salt Lake school teacher said, "Some people are good spellers, some people aren't. That's no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water, like this guy is doing."
But we here in Utah appear to be having the same problems they're having in the UK. One woman spelled speech, "S-p-e-a-c-h." The word twelfth gave people trouble. Two people spelled it, "T-w-e-l-t-h."
Luckily, here in America we have a wonderful invention called Spell Checker, so writing professors in Utah aren't seeing this kind of a problem. They're seeing a different problem entirely.
"There are errors in usage, which is students using the wrong word," says BYU Composition and English Department Director Brian McInelly. He says he'll see students using the word "effect" when they should be using "affect."
Here's another example. "Spelling the word ‘allusion' with an ‘I' instead of an ‘A' when saying something like, ‘the poet makes an allusion to the bible,'" McInelly said. If poets were making magic tricks to the bible, the "I" would be the correct letter.
But since word usage and even spelling errors are so common, should we allow for some variant spellings to be accepted? I mean, English people spoke English before we did, so, shouldn't we just automatically do what they say? Utah State Office of Education Curriculum and Instruction Director Lynne Greenwood says, "I think not." She says spelling skills are the mark of an educated person … or the mark of someone who can use Spell Checker.
"When we look at resumes and documents and such, when it's riddled with spelling errors, it doesn't speak well of the person," Greenwood said.
So, my atempt to get her to axept misspelt words ended in faleyur
E-mail: pnelson@ksl.com
