http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080807/od_nm/...UYYG1P.TevtiBIF

Terrific idea. <_< And how many "variants" are allowed for each word?

Can you understand this: "...had a strok and got parzel on the left sid." Or this: I have cat-cats.

Interpretation: "...had a stroke and got paralyzed on the left side" ... "I have cataracts."

The above was my grandmother's spelling. Is that okay?? Reading her letters was a nightmare, but she did well enough for a 3rd-grade education I suppose.

No way. This is promoting sheer chaos. We must have some level of uniformity.

And that's coming from a person who gets sick and tired of e-mails from the bosses regarding correct use of "affect" and "effect". I'd like to trash both of those stupid words, but try my best to use them correctly.

Sure is. I don't pronounce "knife" as "kuh-ny-fee."

But why should we all look like a bunch of idiots? This is as bad as "okaying" eubonics. And what a nightmare learning English would become for non-native speakers!

I don't know... Perhaps Mr. Smith was being sarcastic.

I can certainly understand his frustration with having to wade through poor spelling. And if PhD. theses were published as they are sometimes originally written, maybe our political classes would be shamed into to stop messing with education.

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Nadme, small trivia.

In that the impliment in the 1100's WAS pronounced "k-nif'. And in a weird reversal of the normal, english influinced the pronunciation of a french word and they made the k silent by the 1300'. According to the authors of "100 Lengendary Knives")

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Low standards and low expectations will only net you low quality and low performance. Linguistic changes occur naturally enough without hurrying them along with such nonsense.

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Peters Creek, Alaska

Read a story in the New York Times today that referred to the republic of Gerogia as a 'polygot' country. Polygot what? A cracker?

Gray Lady Down!

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The purists can say what they want, but in the end, language is dynamic. For a while it was not as dynamic as it used to be, but lately with text messaging, many words now have two or more spellings. I suspect that some of these alternative spellings and arconyms will become part of the core language at some point. I agree that things will be a mess if every spelling is considered acceptable, because then it would be hard to tell which word is the intended word, but the language will change despite the best efforts of the purists.

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As much as I hate to say it jfurbrgr might be right. Permission to go down kicking and screaming, Sir?

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as long as little Timmy feels good about it, it's ok with me.
in the end- that's all that matters, right- how the kid feels at the end of the school day. we can't be bringing little Timmy's self esteem down by telling him that he doesn't need to put an apostrophe in the word every time it ends with the letter "S"..

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Andre

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Did they also pronounce Knight "Ka-niggit" :P

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Permission granted. BYW, BegDone, your position on proper spelling would perhaps be a bit stronger if you hadn't mangled my screen name so badly. I admit that my screen name has never been in the dictionary (unlike toSeek's brief presence in Wilipedia), so maybe correct spelling only applies to items recognized by a spell checker.

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"Kneecht", with the "ch" pronounced as in the traditional pronunciation of the word "loch". No schwas between the "k" and the "n" or between the "ch" and the "t".

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*resounding no*

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Not to be crude but...

Your screen name came premangled when you typed it into your BAUT registration.

I think BigDon may have been trying to help. Kinda.
His version reminded me of food...


hmm...


food...

Food?

After a fashion, I suppose...


As for the OP, new spellings can eventually become a correct spelling once they come into general usage. But I think they should not be accepted as correct before then.

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SeanF

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The contents of this post are ©2009 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

A fashionable burger?

It's....okay, I'm thinking PM for this one. Check your inbox.

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SeanF

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The contents of this post are ©2009 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

Okay, I was having j on a bit with a pseudofalse spelling of his screen name.

Sorry I made him mad.

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i can just see two knights passing in the woods, and one saying to the other- "yo, what is up, my kaniggit" as a form of slang that it's only cool for other knights to say..

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In the First FolioShakespear used several spellings for the same word in the same acts of the same play. He varied the spelling for effect in a passage.

It was the Victorians that pinned language down in a book and killed it. Dr Johnson started it with his Dictionary.

Pity he left out Sausage. lol

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