The Agony of Poor Spelling

[Thenamir]

My parody of my ancestral language aside, I find misspellings to be common, a fact that I surmise (my own personal substitute for I reckon/deem/guess/suppose) is caused in part by how quickly and passionately people respond to some topics. Trying to spill my ideas onto a keyboard before they disappear has caused me to commit more accidental spelling errors than almost anything else.

However, these individuals who are attempting to excuse their incorrect spelling on the basis of what I can only call "contextual" or "phonetic" understandability need to be horse-whipped. It is one thing to betray your lack of erudition by making consistent and uncorrected spelling errors. It is another thing altogether to defend those errors and accuse those who would correct them of pendantry.

I cannot defend the English language on the basis of it's simplicity, certainly, for it is one of the hardest and most irregular languages in existence, or so I have been told. However, people have been accurately learning and using the language for hundreds of years. For a person of normal intelligence to fail to acquire enough knowledge for proper usage of his or her native tongue in twelve years of schooling bespeaks a mental lethargy I cannot fathom. Nevertheless, it happens every day. But for someone to defend that mental lethargy and uphold it as a virtue...that conclusion requires a suspension of thinking altogether. In the words of McKellen's Gandalf, it is abandoning reason for madness.

I pray that the normal denizens of this thread will forgive my tirade. Those of you who agree will understand. Those who don't will probably have to have a dictionary near to hand in order to understand what I have said. But at least they will be able to look up the words, since I have made every effort to spell them correctly.

(Post Scriptum: My proofreading skills are not what they used to be. Please withhold your guffaws should I have missed a typo in the foregoing.)