Fed up with his students' complete inability to spell common English correctly, a British academic has suggested it may be time to accept "variant spellings" as legitimate. [....]
"Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I've got a better idea," Ken Smith, a criminology lecturer at Bucks New University, wrote in the Times Higher Education Supplement.
"University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell."
This is the dumbest thing I've heard in a long time. Someone please have at it. I'm paralyzed. Is it time we burned all of the universities to the ground yet?
18 comments:
he sux. i h8 him. i m plodding his dumb eyes.
(And don't think a little part of me didn't die while I was typing that.)
"University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell."
Doesn't this seem to involve something like a contradiction? Shouldn't he have said "... those words *which we're inclined to say* our students most commonly misspell"? Isn't the whole point to deny that the "variant" spellings are not *misspellings*?
Oh, I don't even know anymore... Am I supposed to believe that, say, English lit and composition (and even ESL) professors are supposed to support this line of thinking?
And would anything be considered an incorrect spelling anymore? Suppose I wrote... hmmm... "Ken Smith sucks the privates of dead infants"? but then asserted that it said... "I spent my summer vacation on Mount Olympus," but with "varient" spelling?
Right. It seems that what should count as a variant spelling cannot simply be a matter of choice. There should be some kind of explanation deriving from the history of the development of the language as investigated by linguists (as in the case of "color" vs. "colour").
And, by that rationale, there are only X amount of correct spellings. So why would we not just use the way(s) we already have, you dumb motherfucker Ken Smith???
Scarlett Johansson endorses Ken Smith's proposal. Or so it seems...
This is actually even weirder and Doom-bound than it sounds. The account makes it sound as though the academics are advocating descriptivism only with respect to spelling, and spelling alone. However, this can't come apart from grammatical descriptivism. Simple spelling errors, like mistaking 'there' for 'their,' are mistakes about parts of speech. It's a package deal.
I recommend checking out David Foster Wallace's Tense Present: Democracy, English and the Wars Over Usage for a fun, interesting (and controversial) piece about this topic. (You have to scroll down the page to get to the article.)
heh... it's the same excuse used to dumb down math standards in schools... good luck...
I second the awesomeness of DFW on this topic.
I tend to have some mild descriptivist leanings, but KS-ish tolerance for dreck in the academy gives me the howling fantods.
729:
Thanks for the Wallace piece. Nice!
I recently had occasion to revisit the Orwell essays that are related to this issue. Damn that guy rocked.
There’s no sense in being anything but a descriptivist when it comes to natural languages. And one of the inevitable facts about natural languages is that they change. Don’t like seeing “they” with a singular antecedent? Tough. William Safire can stomp his little bootie all he wants, but unless he’s willing to start gunning down everyone under 30, he’s just going to have to suck it up.
But the conventions of writing are just that--conventions. They aren’t built into our brains any more than chess is. So it doesn’t really matter what conventions we use (the orthography of Chinese is a bit harder to learn than the orthography of English, but not prohibitively so), as long as we use the same ones. We keep from smashing our cars into one another because we all agree to accept the arbitrary notion that green means go and red means stop and to act in accordance with that agreement, not because there’s anything right or wrong, correct or incorrect about linking green with go. The benefits of having and perpetuating a set of standard spellings should be correspondingly obvious, even to a halfwit like Ken Smith.
English Jerk: What an eloquent and well-written response!
Here is the major problem in the UK (and I note that this story is about a UK academic): our students need not study English past the age of 11. Worse, if they do, they do not study grammar.
The problem here is compounded by the fact that about half the books in our bookshops use UK-spelling and grammar, the other half use US-spelling and grammar...as do most websites. The problems with spelling words correctly are primarily with words that are spelled differently in the UK (judgement) versus the US (judgment), the different uses of punctuation (UK uses single quotes for quotations with final quote mark placed inside 'full stop'; US uses double quotations with the final quote mark placed outside the 'period'), and changing conventions: many words spelled with a 's' in the middle may have a 'z', hence 'organisation' is often now found in US-form ('organization') and so on.
What is striking to me -- as an American in the UK -- is not that there are many rules on proper gramar and spelling, but how uniform their use is in the US and how varied (and often incorrect) they are in the UK.
I thought English was compulsory (and assessed) until 16, at least in England (although I think there may be different rules for Welsh- and Irish-speaking schools?).
And I don’t know about websites, but I find the idea that 50% of books sold in UK bookshops use American English remarkable. I’d be surprised if more than a tiny proportion (say 1-2%) were (although books sold online are probably a different matter).
Also, some of the ‘changing conventions’ are not really that. For instance, historically, organize would have been the more common English (UK) spelling (and makes more sense).
In any case, it’s true that the rules of grammar and language are more standard (and rational) in the US (since this was, after all, Webster’s aim).
729: Thanks for the kind words!
Anonymous: Since you don’t provide your reasons, I’m not sure why you think that spelling ‘organize’ with a ‘z’ “makes more sense,” much less why you think that the US conventions are “more standard” and also more “rational.” I’m guessing that your reasoning runs like this: ‘organize’ is better than ‘organise’ because the corresponding sound is often spelled with a ‘z’ (zither, zipper). Then again, there’s ‘business’ and ‘xylophone,’ but I guess we could fix those as well, making them, say, ‘bihznes’ and ‘zaylowfon.’ Of course, we couldn’t just stop there if we want the spelling conventions to make sense, to be perfectly “rational”; we’d have to keep going, all the way through to ‘saykawlujee’ and ‘bloonz.’ We’ll need a few more letters, since the standard American dialects have 33 consonants and 13 vowels, but once it’s all fixed everything will be perfectly clear.
There’s just one problem: should Canadians spell about ‘aboot’? And should Australians spell our ‘no’ as ‘noy’? English is the lingua franca in about (or aboot) 60 countries, the majority of which do not speak my American dialect. Well, we could adopt some American dialect as the spelling standard--problem solved, as long as you don’t mind the majority of the world’s English speakers hating you.
Oh wait--there’s one more problem. Languages change (see above). So we either permanently keep a record of a dialect that before long virtually no-one will speak, or we change the spelling standard every few decades. Shall we re-print all those misspelled books each time? Perhaps you should start saving your pennies for this noble venture.
Orthography is a convention (see above). It’s no more “rational” to spell ‘organize’ with a ‘z’ then it is to drive on the right side of the road instead of the left. Noah Webster, blind to this fact, decided to take a perfectly good convention and muck it up, partly from reactionary nationalism, partly from sheer stupidity.
The “rules” of “language,” however, are not conventions, American or otherwise. They are facts about the human brain, facts that (pathological cases aside) are uniform across the species. However charming Webster may be, you should consider bringing your linguistics up to date: try the first two chapters of Chomsky’s 1986 book Knowledge of Language for a start.
Anonymous again.
Sorry, yes, I should have been clearer. On ‘organize’ making ‘more sense’ than ‘organise’, the reason I had in mind is that the suffix derives from the Greek ‘–izo’. Instead of ‘more sense’ I should probably have written that the ‘z’ spelling was ‘historically the convention’ (in England). In any case, the point I had in mind was that English schoolchildren, if they use ‘organize’, are not making a spelling mistake (both are perfectly acceptable English, the ‘z’ spelling is not a US-influence, and it is the ‘s’ spelling which is the newcomer in England).
On US being ‘more standard (and rational)’, you’re right, I didn’t express this very well. What I had in mind (in relation to the previous post) was that ‘the rules on grammar and spelling’ are more varied (and less standardised) in UK English (so, for example, I can correctly use both ‘organise’ and ‘organize’). It was, as you say, wrong to describe this as 'more rational'.
Anon.: My apologies for misconstruing your argument. I agree that spellings that preserve traces of the etymologies of words are appealing (though a bound morpheme like –ize seems harder to make a case for). As a lit geek, etymology is endlessly titillating to me. But I wouldn’t, for example, want to legislate that we should adopt English spellings that maximize etymological transparency; doing so would involve much the same sort of pedantry that gets some people all hot and bothered about words like automobile that mix Greek and Latin roots. And I doubt that, outside of scholarly contexts, anyone’s use of language will actually be enriched by the fact that the spelling of psychology preserves the Greek word psyche, especially since the traditional divisions between pneuma, psyche, and soma are now rather remote even from folk science.
Thanks to the fact that English spellings started being regularized in the Early Modern period, during which a good portion of the literate population (a small fraction of the total population) had some acquaintance with Latin and Greek, our current system already preserves plenty of etymological residue. And that seems to me another good argument for just preserving our current conventions more or less permanently. This would avoid all of the problems I mentioned before, and would also keep me permanently titillated.
And I would also agree that neither ‘organize’ nor ‘organise’ is misspelled. But frankly I’m not particularly worried about the fact that many of my students are terrible spellers. Such matters are trifles compared to the fact that our students are never trained to make arguments: to formulate valid inferences, to evaluate evidence, to separate logical substance from rhetorical splutter, etc. Most US students spend twelve years in school without even having the opportunity to take a single philosophy class. And don’t even get me started on the so-called “English” curriculum...
english jerk:
*But frankly I’m not particularly worried about the fact that many of my students are terrible spellers. Such matters are trifles compared to the fact that our students are never trained to make arguments: to formulate valid inferences, to evaluate evidence, to separate logical substance from rhetorical splutter, etc.*
Nicely put! I might add that although they're not trained to make arguments, et al, they are (somehow) trained in all of the typical intellectual vices.
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