BBC reported on the 7th of this month that Ken Smith from Bucks New University is advocating the acceptance of commonly misspelled words as “variant spellings.”

In the original article at Times Higher Education, Smith provides ten candidates for orthographic leniency:

  1. Arguement for argument.
  2. Febuary for February (and Wensday for Wednesday).
  3. Ignor for ignore.
  4. Occured for occurred.
  5. Opertunity for opportunity.
  6. Que for queue, or better yet cue or even kew.
  7. Speach for speech.
  8. Thier for their (or better still, why not just drop the word their altogether in favour of there?).
  9. Truely for truly.
  10. Twelth as twelfth.

His final exhortation is: “Remember, I am not asking you to learn to spell these words differently. All I am suggesting is that we might well put 20 or so of the most commonly misspelt words in the English language on the same footing as those other words that have a widely accepted variant spelling.”

If Smith is onto something, then a paragraph like this one could become common fare:

“On the twelth of Febuary a fierce arguement occured between two gentlemen standing in a que at First National Bank. The altercation began when the man in front chose to ignor the importunate speach of the man behind him, who earnestly desired to advance to the window more quickly by taking his place. The heated exchange lasted until the bank closed in the afternoon, thus preventing either man from doing the business he had come to do. It was a truely lamentable event. Thier hope is to try again this Wensday, when they plan to visit the bank at separate times.”

What do you think? Is Smith’s proposal merely an accommodation to sloth or is it an inevitable outworking of the adaptability of human language (think Shakespeare vs. today)?