Professor Ken Smith

Why not just accept that you’re never going to iron out the most common spelling mistakes and simply accept them as “variants,” he suggests.

“Either we go on beating ourselves and our students up over this problem or we simply give everyone a break and accept these variant spellings as such,” he says.

He’s thinking of words like argument, that often comes at him as “arguement,” or twelth (twelfth) and all those words that break the i-before-e rule like weird and seize.

What do you think? Is correct spelling just for pedants and crossword fiends nowadays?

(P.S. We promise not to put your replies through spellcheck)

After my son proudly produced his first hand-written book, delightfully entitled “Imfmashen about plarnts” and peppered with details about “leevs” and “roots ” and “barc”, my sympathy for children (and teachers) across the English-speaking world
deepened.

How is it possible that the spelling such words as “cough” and “although” and “through” should be so similar when they sound so different?

In some ways, it would seem a shame to reduce our often beautiful and eccentric language to a series of text-message-like phonetics, but when you consider the cost of
teaching spelling to our children –  the SSS estimates it at an eye-watering £18 million a year in Britain alone — the argument gains some weight.

In other languages, like Spanish, learning the alphabet gives you immediate access to be able to read, spell and pronounce every word — even those you have never come across and don’t understand.

And with Spanish competing with English as the world’s most dominant language, is it time for the English-speaking world to modernise or die.