I’m sure I’ve discussed this before but English is a mongrel language and morphs as the times change. The word gay used to mean happy and if I read any stories written before the 1970s I stop and think about this word to ensure I get the right meaning. I’m also really annoyed at gays for appropriating this word and changing the meaning but that’s my personal bugbear. Now there is a professor of English from Oxford who is advocating the official standardisation of ‘there’, ‘they’re’ and ‘their’.

spelling is much more fluid

I can’t deny it would make it easier and in about 20 years time when I’ve had time to adjust to this change I might possibly stop rewriting these words in my head to get the right one, but it’s a big change. Changes used to be organic and would just happen, at least until the English dictionary was codified by Samual Johnson in 1755, since then changes have to be ratified before starting to become accepted as standard use. An interesting thing nowadays as we have so many more people talking to one another thanks to the internet and social media. I’m sure I’ve mentioned the morphing in social media of words such as ‘probably’ to ‘prolly’.

Simon Horobin, the professor of English, does use examples of changeable spelling. He uses Shakespeare’s name as one of them and you can find him spelling his name in several different ways, something my English teacher mentioned a couple of years ago.

When I was in grade 5 I had a lovely teacher. She took us through a lesson every so often which consisted of spelling things phonetically. I had such trouble with that as spelling was already ingrained within my psyche and to change from spelling correctly to spelling phonetically was nigh on impossible for me. If you go back to before the dictionaries you’ll find spelling is much more fluid and probably more phonetic. I did hear recently but can’t find the page to back it up that scribes spelled words very fluidly in order to keep up with dictation, often in a language they didn’t understand too well. That must be some skill, to take dictation in a language you don’t know too well.