Correct spelling is the mark of an intelligent human!

Wired magazine recently published this article by Anne Trubek who once again gives credence to the idea that the usage of language should be fluid, unstructured and we should not care about incorrect spelling in the digital age.

In this benighted article, the author once again harks back to days of yore in which phonetic spelling was used and, before standardisation of the language by first Samuel Johnson and then The Oxford English Dictionary, I refuse to call that rag Websters a dictionary, made English into a recognisable and repeatable method of communication.

While a “professor” of language, and I remind the reader that a “professor” is someone who “thinks” that they know something and not necessarily someone with actual valuable knowledge, may believe that they know far more than their predecessors; change, especially in written language, is not necessarily a good thing. Some people might consider that a language which changes quickly due to social pressures is cool and exiting, it really just shows that the lowest common denominator applies and that pig-laziness on the part, usually of children, who think that textspeak is cool, enables any number of spellings to be valid and that if you’re inclined to just go back to reading phonetically again, all will be well.

Language, and more importantly, written language is what advances our civilisation from dirt, disease and brutality towards understanding, health and betterment. A written language that is eminently repeatable and understandable is an absolute requirement for the communication of scientific ideas across the barrier of generations. Our knowledge of all things scientific and technical that our ancestors learned has been passed to us, even across the gulf of ignorance presented by the dark-ages, by written texts in Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Latin, the list is too great to mention. Our very civilisation has been accomplished by enabling children from different villages to communicate in one standard way and to have at least one common root from which their experience can grow the tree of knowledge.

On my facebook page I accept friend requests from people all over the world. I am open to all points of view but the ones that I remove or ignore quickly are the ones whose posts are habitually rendered in textspeak. It is so tiresome to read and so variable that it becomes hard work to even look at. When there are four, six or even many more different ways of spelling the same word or conveying the same meaning, even trying to accept the ideas put forward, however interesting they may be, becomes a chore not worth doing.

I truly hope that the crackpot ideas of people who pollute a language that is designed to enable communication for the betterment of mankind are quashed by the continued demonstration that a concise and understandable written phrase flows into the conscious mind far easier than one which breaks the rules of comprehensibility just to be “cool”.