I’ve seen tihs ietm a few tmies on the Intneret and it awylas aazmes me. Our bnrais alitbiy. Thye can umsncarlbe any wrod so lnog as the frist and the lsat lteetr are in the smae pacle. The rset of the ltteres can be ctpmoleley jlmuebd up and it mkaes no diceernffe. Anarpletpy the roesan is bsaucee the biarn deos not raed ecah iidvuidanl lteter but the einrte wrod ilsetf. Taht is why you can raed waht I hvae just tpyed. Ueaelinbvble.
As always it got me thinking:
1. We can get rid of the spellcheck. Yippee. One less irritation when dealing with Word and the unwinnable fight trying to turn off the US version.
2. Dyslexics are unnecessarily stigmatised.
3. So long as you can make yourself understood should we care how a word is spelt? Spelling is clearly overrated. You see it with texting. I used 2 h8 it. Now I luv al the shortcuts.
Well, the big issue is that you need a baseline within which to cheat the system. In other words, we need to know how to spell words before we get to bastardise them, because that provides us with a context in which to unscramble them.
On the other hand, perhaps all we need to know is how to read. Reading is very different to spelling: ask my five-year-old who reads perfectly well but spells everything phonetically – and always manages to make herself perfectly understood.
What do you think?
This post was selected for Lovely Words Vol.31, hosted by Writing as a Sacred Art.
Image credit: Kirsten Loza
British thriller writer O.C. Heaton, author of The Human Race, is fascinated by the past, present and future of human evolution. (Image credit: Ross Parry Agency)
