Spelling Nazis are us

I am a bit pedantic with spelling. I am not perfect, but I am always jarred by blatently blatantly incorrect spelling.

This gentleman wants to lower the bar. I say no. It is bad enuff with email, chat, gaming and SMS without deliberately accepting spelling variants. That will happen over time. Look at Yanqui English.

Rather than grammarians getting in a huff about "argument" being spelled "arguement" or "opportunity" as "opertunity," why not accept anything that's phonetically (fonetickly anyone?) correct as long as it can be understood?

"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."

To kickstart his proposal, Smith suggested 10 common misspellings that should immediately be accepted into the pantheon of variants, including "ignor," "occured," "thier," "truely," "speach" and "twelth" (it should be "twelfth").

I mean how does atrosious look to you? Atrocious? It does to me, the soon to be spelling snob elitist.

That would annoy me and distract from my ability to read a paper. I think of email and sms need to be spelt spelled correctly. Hannah has spelling lists every week now and I can certainly identify with some of the challenges that kids go through constructing English words in a way that makes sense. Part structure, part pattern, part familiarity, part phonetics. Worth struggling through I think. It is all very well to use spell checker and dictionary.com, but the ability to spell correctly is very useful life skill that is being eroded.

And is it mispell or misspell?