@reallynicestamps wrote:
So is a "sequence of events", in young-speak, a sparkly dress you wear to a special occasion?
Now, now, rose, let's not be ageist.
There are lots of rotten spellers of all ages out there. And a high proportion of Canadians do not have English as a mother tongue nor have they received formal education in English.
Pronounce this word.
GHOTI
GH as in enough
O as in women
TI as in action
Or phonetically, fish.
The "GHOTI" joke is an old linguist's trick that we take fiendish delight in playing on unsuspecting non-linguists at cocktail parties. There is that look of utter consternation during, and the look of utter illumination after delivery that make it so good. Ohhhhhhhh, I get it!
Actually I haven't seen this in decades (I won't say how many). You must have spent some time in university linguistics to have picked this one up. I wonder if we ever crossed paths?
Here's another you might appreciate, that in order to be a proper party joke must be written down by the deliverer and read aloud by the recipient, then repeated by the deliverer with an exaggerated Italian accent just in case the baffled recipient didn't get it:
"Euripides pants, Eumenides pants".
In fact I do have an issue with bad spelling, or as in the "sequence" example, no spelling at all, and a complete ignorance of the foundations of one's own language. People don't use dictionaries anymore because I doubt they are still taught the value of a dictionary as schoolchildren. English is a grand old language with a colourful history and great possibilities for nuance. It deserves more respect. It's as if we were to say to people that they can just listen to Bach or Beethoven and pick up a few melodies here and there by ear to bang out on a piano. Who cares if you can actually read the music and play it faithfully?
Having taught ESL, I do have great deal of empathy and understanding for people whose mother tongue is not one of our official languages. For those who come to this country as adults it is very difficult to simply "pick up" another language and speak (let alone write) properly. I give great credit to those who make the effort.
However, where younger people are concerned who have grown up in Canada, I don't think it's fair to label my bias as ageism. Calling it ageism excuses the sloppiness and lack of care that seem to be evident in so many areas of life today. Have schools failed to pass on these skills, or are parents also partly to blame?
As far as English spelling itself is concerned, if everybody decided to stop bothering and simply wrote whatever they thought might be "about right" phonetically, we'd soon begin to have difficulty understanding what other people were writing.
Actually, as you probably know, this was precisely the reason that standardized spelling was introduced in the first place (and not only for English). People were having trouble interpreting what others were saying, and legal texts were impossible to write clearly. We'd descend into Babel pretty quickly.
This is probably what's happening right now in any case with the use of truncated language and code on mobile devices. Its eventual outcome will be interesting -- we may ironically end up losing the formal written language, after over a thousand years of rising to the height of civilization. So yes, a shared conformity (or agreement) on spelling for proper communication does matter.
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