Brits Are Bad Spellers

Oooo. Like we didn’t already know that!

There’s an article in The Register which discusses which words are searched for most via Ask.com . It points out:

…that Brits find “accommodation” the most challenging.

That’s according to Ask.com, which also fingered “accessory”, “guarantee” and “opportunity” as hot faves for correction plus, natch, “embarrass”. Also on the list of shame were “restaurant” and “February”, while “hundreds of people are also confused by the letter order of eighth and the silent ‘p’ in ‘receipt'”, as the Telegraph puts it.

Why is this happening?

Yup, you guessed it: Text speak, reliance on spellcheckers and general bone idleness are about to consign our beloved mother lingo to orthographical oblivion.

The standards of spelling and grammar these days are appalling. An additional problem, in my opinion, is the almost mandatory approach to bad spelling: ignore it and don’t identify it as a fault, because you might upset someone. The best examples of this come from annual stories about exam marking. This one is from The Times Online.

A head teacher is refusing to publish the results of some national curriculum tests after discovering such poor marking that pupils who performed strongly fared worse than poor students.

Child A wrote about Pip Davenport, a fairground inventor: “If he wasent doing enthing els heel help his uncle Herry at the funfair during the day. And had stoody at nigh on other thing he did was invent new rides.

“Becoues he invented a lot of new rides he won a prize. He didn’t live with his mum he lived with his wife.**

This received one mark more than Child B who wrote: “Quickly, it became apparent that Pip was a fantastic rider: a complete natural. But it was his love of horses that led to a tragic accident. An accident that would change his life forever.

It reminds me of that recent buzz about aliens that The Sun was into. I’m sure aliens already walk amongst us – and some of them mark exam papers.

I’d just like to point out any spelling mistakes in this blog are actually typos – not mistakes. I don’t use a spellchecker, but I do proofread posts myself.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

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