I KEN SPEL

I’m a terrible speller. I always have been. Anyone that has ever had an IM conversation with me can attest that I still am a bad speller. I think, in fact, that had it been popular when I was young I would have been diagnosed with a case of dyslexia. My spelling grades used to give my teachers fits. I love books and reading and I would read at any opportunity in school. During reading time I would read ahead of the class. During math or science or whatever, I would often have a book open below the desk and be reading. I remember several times being singled out to please pay attention now because I got lost in a book I was reading and never realized that free reading time was now over.

I’m still not a very good speller and I’m often grateful for the spell checkers that can even correct my spellings of BOOGA. Even with that electronic crutch I’ve managed to self correct a number of errors by simply learning the patterns of the letters through repetition. If I pound something in long enough I eventually learn it.

You may have seen this link before where it claims that spelling is irrelevant as long as the first and last letters are correct in any given word. This works because the human brain is very very good at finding patterns in chaos.

But the fact remains that this type of communication is chaotic. It takes much longer to parse the meaning of the paragraph than it would if it were spelled properly. And what is the point of deliberately slow communication?

In addition since it disregards any of the rules of the language it would be impossible to decipher a new word. Try taking a chemical name and reading it that way. Deoxyribonucleic is easy to read even if you don’t know what it is because it follows the rules of pronunciation. You can read it out loud correctly and someone that knows what it means can explain it to you. Mixing up the letters into a jumble will just slow down the ability to communicate for those who already know the word and prevent anyone who doesn’t already know it from learning it at all.