Posted by
Ed Lilly on Monday, August 11, 2008 12:54:37 PM
From a news story on
a proposal in Great Britain to do away with the notion that there are correct and incorrect spellings of words:
Playwright George Bernard Shaw was fond of pointing out that the word
"ghoti" could just as well be pronounced "fish" if you followed common
pronunciation: 'gh' as in "tough," 'o' as in "women" and 'ti' as in
"nation."
The proposal does not seem to be getting any traction, but it's an amusing article all the same. It seems to me that it would make teaching children to read and write all that much more difficult if you throw out the idea that there are right and wrong ways to spell a word. But I would get tremendous satisfaction if one of my kids were clever enough to come with a spelling like Shaw's for fish and tried to get it past a teacher.