My Heart Quails ...

"Making an Arguement for Misspelling -- TIME magazine, 8/12/2008" I agree that English spelling rules are convoluted and illogical, as are many of its sentence constructions and grammatical structures. And yet ... and yet ... there's something so terribly disheartening about the idea of just, I don't know, giving up on learning to spell correctly. It's one thing to choose to reject a set of rules because you have undertaken the task of following them and acknowledge that they're broken; it's another to throw up your hands and decide that trying is too hard. An Economist sidebar on this same subject, which advocates "updating" rather than "scrapping" the rules, briefly explains five reasons why written English is so wonky. Which is cool! Cuz while I knew about or of some of these things, and that English is wonky, I'd never put them together before. 1. It's partly Germanic and partly Latin in origin 2. The aural Great Vowel Shift in the 15/16th centuries left written words as they were, but changed the pronunciation. (I learned about the GVS in a linguistics class. I love that this event actually occurred and is referred to in title case.) 3. Early printing presses were staffed by non-English speakers, who muddled things up further 4. There was at some point a move to attempt to align English words with Latin roots, even though the words weren't originally derived from Latin, leading to extraneous "silent" letters 5. There's never been a centralized English "authority" capable of enforcing standardization, unlike (apparently) French and Spanish Sigh. Guess we'll have to rely on Webster's for our central spelling authority ... for as long as that lasts.