1/14/08 READER SUBMITTED COMMENTS: Greenwich Roundup Needs To Be More Careful - Newsstand is misspelled in blog headline

How Bad Can Your Spelling “Bee”?

wot u tawking aboit? I can spel

Dear Greenwich Roundup,

The correct spelling is newsstand not newstand - thought you'd want to correct this.

COMMENT:

Thank You For Your Help.

I Will Make The Change Immediately.

As Usual, Greenwich's One Eyed Blogger Who Hunts

And Pecks On The Keyboard With One Finger

Has Butchered The English Language Again.

There a possibility that Greenwich Roundup might be dyslexic.

Personally I think common spelling mistakes should be accepted into everyday use,

not corrected, The most common spelling mistakes should simply be accepted as "variant spellings".

If the meaning has been conveyed and communication has occurred

why is there a need to make corrections?

Many Famous Poets' And Writers' Spelling Mistakes Are Very Similar To Greenwich Roundups Errors.

Here is a selection of spelling mistakes (and a few punctuation mistakes) by some famous poets, taken mostly from the manuscripts of their poems.

Emily Dickinson

words: extasy extatic boquet Febuary nescessity nescessary unannointed teazing bretheren independant boddice shily witheld

apostrophes: does’nt did’nt it’s solemn abbeys it’s dripping feet

Ezra Pound

words: tarrif diarhoa damd supercedes indespensible sustinence devines (vb) assylum weird assininities

apostrophes: cant don’t isnt wouldn’t thats wont

William Wordsworth

words: eughtrees questined craggs vullgar untill lillies pennyless impressd fellt receved anixious plungd th (the) whith (with) strage (strange)

apostrophes: your’s

John Milton

words: persues persuers cheife cheifly scituation raign (reign) beleive woomb Egipt eys (eyes) Iland waight

Virginia Woolf

Words: pannelled, busyness (?), naiv (?)

Apostrophes: cant, shant, wont, dont, wouldnt, isntthat’s, you’re a woman of genius, I feel sure your worsePrima Donna's, a childs highchair, a donkeys head, fathers state, the Fabians discourse

Keats Ode To Autumn

Season of Mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom friend of the maturing sun

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

The Vines with fruit that round the thatch eves run

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage trees

And fill all furuits with sweeness to the core

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazle shells

With a white kernel; to set budding more

And still more later flowers for the bees

Until they think wam days with never cease

For Summer has o’erbrimm’d their clammy cells

Many of these are exactly the same mistakes as on Greenwich Roundup's web pages. On the other hand some of them may have been deliberate choices by the writers - Milton for example had strong views on spelling - or may have been a spelling variant at the time the poet was writing.

So Greenwich Roundup says bad spelling doesn't matter, and English teachers and language fusspots put too much emphasis on it. After all, classic English writers did not spell very well by present-day standards.

For instance, Chaucer (14th century) says of one of his characters, "She wolde wepe, if that she saugh a mous kaught in a trappe." Today that sentence would be written, "She would weep if she saw a mouse caught in a trap." The title page of Richard III, a play by Shakespeare (first printed in 1597), tells of the king's "pittieful murther of his iunocent nephewes." And the sainted Jane Austen in the novel Sense and Sensibility (1811) spells stopped as stopt and scissors as scissars. Rotten spellers can also take comfort

In the fact that some modern authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald have succeeded splendidly even though they couldn't spell worth a hoot. Isn't that, they ask, what copy editors are for? And if Greenwich Roundup keeps growing like gang busters we just be able to hire a grammer nazi to be our copy editor.

So why are there so many Americans, who like Greenwich Roundup, are lousy spellers?

Are we not as bright as others around the globe?

Do we as a nation suffer unduly from dyslexia?

Or are we too lazy or undisciplined to take the time to learn to spell well?

Actually, more often than not the real culprit is the language itself. In languages such as Spanish, Italian, German, and Finnish, words tend to be spelled as they are pronounced. But in English–not the most logical of tongues–spelling sometimes bears only a fleeting relation to pronunciation. Indeed, numerous English words blatantly defy the rules of phonetics (the science of speech sounds and their written symbols). All of the following words, for example, contain the sh sound but in each case the sound is spelled differently: chaperon, conscious, issue, mansion, mission, nation, nausea, ocean, shoe, sugar, suspicion.

The vagaries of English are also notoriously on display in what one authority has called "those worrisome `ough' tangles," where the same spelling represents no less than nine different sounds: bough, cough, drought, hiccough, rough, thorough, though, thought, through. The lack of phonetic consistency between pronunciation and spelling has caused, and continues to cause, much grief not only among those learning English as a foreign language but native born speakers as well.

Over the years teachers of English have wrestled with the question of how best to teach spelling. Because of the inconsistency factor, most educators today, as in the past, place heavy emphasis on rote learning. Students are required to memorize, and are drilled on, the correct spelling of new and unfamiliar words, inflected forms, and derivations. In addition, various spelling rules and their inevitable exceptions must be learned, surely the most famous being "Use i before e except after c or when it is sounded like a, as in neighbor and weigh." Exceptions to the exception must also be drummed into the brains of beleaguered students, either and seize being examples in the case of the "i before e" rule.

If we can go to the moon, if we can map the human genome, if we can invent duct tape, then why for pete's sake can't we devise a better way to learn to spell? In the last half century, English has emerged as the dominant world language, the global idiom in science and technology, politics and diplomacy, economics and trade, culture and the arts.

C U L8R

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“I speak perfect grammar. I don't know what they are talking about. I just told Iran to halt its nucular program and to lower the terriers on US goods and services to provide a free market economee for amerucin businesses like those in texes that I hold stock in!”
~ George W. Bush on Bad Grammar