Times article on spelling

Question

The attached link is moderately on topic, I find.http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1097918,00.htmlEdwardThe reading group's reading group:http://www.bookgroup.org.uk

Usenet · Accepted Answer

[nq:1]The attached link is moderately on topic, I find. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1097918,00.html[/nq]
You have to register to see the article. Can you just cut and paste the relevant parts?

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]The attached link is moderately on topic, I find. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1097918,00.html[/nq]
That's probably a very nice article, but unless you pay them money, The Times does not let one read their articles on-line any more.

Could you paraphrase the article for us?

Stefano
http://www.steve-and-pattie.com/esperantujo

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]The attached link is moderately on topic, I find. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1097918,00.html[/nq]
[nq:1]That's probably a very nice article, but unless you pay them money, The Times does not let one read their articles on-line any more. Could you paraphrase the article for us?[/nq]
Sorry about that - forgot about the registration. Yer tiz.

The end of a bad spell?
By Jane Shilling
Generations of children were cheated by educationists who devalued spelling
LIKE Oscar Wilde contemplating the death of Little Nell, I find myself thinking that you would need a heart of stone not to laugh at the exquisitely tactful letter recently sent by the Head Master of Harrow, Mr Barnaby Lenon, to the parents of his charges, announcing that henceforth the chaps of the Lower Sixth will be required to take a literacy test. "They will," he added reassuringly, "be given extra tuition until they reach a pass level."
Coo, I bet they will.
It is certainly pleasant to think that henceforth the grander sort of estate agent (for some reason I imagine posh estate agents to have been educated almost exclusively at Harrow) will actually be able to read and write. But what, pray, has brought all this on? Let us ask Mr Lenon.
"Quite a lot of our boys get very high grades in GCSE English but we don't think they have reached the highest possible level in their written English. They can have good grades even though their literacy and standard of written English is only moderately good. Universities are complaining all the time that their students can't write English . . . "
Stripped of its graceful equivocation, this means that dear little Nigel Molesworth can perfectly well have a full set of A* grades in English GCSE (and A level, and AS level) and still be effectively illiterate. Then, when he fails to get into Oxford (even to read theology or geography, those traditional resorts of the less academically ambitious candidate), his parents, who have paid £20,000-odd a year for five years to have him trained to communicate in basic English, are not unnaturally surprised and hurt, and wonder whether they might not just as well have sent the wretched boy to the local comprehensive and put the surplus dosh into a villa in Spain near a good golf course.
The wonder of all this is, really, that anyone should ever have imagined that "spelling, grammar, puncuation and the ability to structure arguments" ? the areas in which the young Harrovians are now to be coached ? didn't matter in the first place. But for a long, bleak period in British education, these things were viewed with horror, as impediments to individuality and self-expression, and the teaching of them to young children was regarded as punitive, boring and inimical to creativity.
The results of that philosophy are now horribly evident, in at least two generations of young adults who, although intelligent, verbally articulate and convinced of the overwhelming importance of personal feeling, have the written communications skills of small children and ? most sinisterly of all ? if they are aware of being linguistically handicapped, seem quite untroubled by the fact.This indifference towards the way in which its own citizens communicate in their native language is a peculiarly British phenomenon. When I was a spelling-obsessed small child, one of my favourite stories was the passage in Laura Ingalls Wilder's 19th-century memoir of American frontier life, Little Town on the Prairie, in which the inhabitants of the Little Town get together to amuse themselves during the long, dull winter by organising a spelling bee ? which Laura's Pa wins, with a triumphant rendition of "xanthophyll".

A century and a half later, the entrancing documentary about the US national spelling bee, Spellbound, proves that North Americans are still mad about spelling as a form of cultural enrichment. There are two glorious things about Spellbound. The first is the deep sense it communicates of the love and reverence of a nation of immigrants for their adopted language.
And the second is the entrancing spectacle of children from all backgrounds, from privileged and cultivated to extremely deprived, reading the dictionary for pleasure.
Perhaps on the back of Spellbound ? at any rate, better late than never ? the BBC seems to have taken up the idea of spelling as both intellectually rewarding and fun, with its forthcoming series Hard Spell (promisingly described as "Pop Idol with spelling"). Perhaps the same cultural critics who sneer at the Beeb's earnest league tables of the nation's favourite books will find the spelling project equally comic ? its Scrabble-playing tendencies rather emphasising the suspicion that as a nation we suffer collectively from a mild case of high-functioning autism.
But anything that realises the grand ambition of Hard Spell's producer, Karen Smith ? to "make it fashionable to spell well" ? is to be encouraged. Amusing as it is to think of all those Harrovian Tim Nice-But-Dims, breathing heavily over their literacy prep, the spectacle becomes a good deal less entertaining if you transpose it to Another Part of the Wood, where children the same age as those Harrovians ? just as able, but even more poorly trained in the fundamentals of writing their own language ? are picking up their A* GCSE English results, imagining that the qualification means something and finding that, in fact, it is proof of nothing at all: not even an ability to communicate fluently in that most beautiful of all languages, plain English.
WORD POWER
WE asked the writers below for the correct spellings of the following words: diarrhoea, accommodation, inoculate, supersede, liaison.

BORIS JOHNSON
Of all the evil emanations of the American empire, the Windows Spellchecker is the worst.
Is it beyond the wit of man to devise a spellchecker that works in English, not American? Can't The Times start a campaign? What else are you there for?
Score: 5/5
JOHN MORTIMER
I'm terribly bad at spelling but I'm not sure how much that matters. Evelyn Waugh was always having to look things up, and Shakespeare couldn't spell.
What is important is the preservation of language. Nouns should not be used as verbs ? all this talk of "accessing" something. And that ghastly management speak ? talking about everything in terms of "paradigms"
Score: 4/5
Wrong: "D-I-A . . . I can't spell that. How many Hs? There's an O-E-A at the end"
JILLY COOPER
Gibber is one I always struggle with. Is it a G or a J? There are more important things than spelling but it's tragic that children have lost the habit of learning
Score: 3/5
Wrong: diarrhoea, liaison

Usenet · Answer

--

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]Sorry about that - forgot about the registration. Yer tiz. The end of a bad spell? By Jane Shilling Generations ... boy to the local comprehensive and put the surplus dosh into a villa in Spain near a good golf course.[/nq]
(etc. etc.)
Wow, is this what passes for commentary in the Times these days? What is her gripe with Harrovians? That they're too upper-class, or not upper-class enough? Not to mention all her other resentments.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2](snip)[/nq]
[nq:1]This indifference towards the way in which its own citizens communicate in their native language is a peculiarly British phenomenon.[/nq]
No, it isn't. American schools are just now beginning to teach reading again. Spelling, grammar, punctuation? Whatever for? Penmanship of course children pick that up automatically, don't they?
It's only a couple years that part of Tennessee quit participating in the National Spelling Bee, because not winning the local bee was so injurious to the self-esteem of all those poor little kids.
[nq:1]BORIS JOHNSON Of all the evil emanations of the American empire, the Windows Spellchecker is the worst. Is it beyond ... that works in English, not American? Can't The Times start a campaign? What else are you there for? Score: 5/5[/nq]
Wouldn't it be nice if anything from Microsoft came with an instruction manual? In Microsoft Word, click on oh, gee, I forget, and I don't have Word on this computer! anyway, two clicks somewhere get you to a list of languages, two of which are "English UK" and "English US."
Granted, a few years ago all spelling checkers accepted either at the same time. It was as happy with "judgement" as with "judgment." Although I think they were a tad low on the UK content, leaving out most (all?) of those extra Os and a fair number of the extra Us.

Cece

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]Wouldn't it be nice if anything from Microsoft came with an instruction manual? In Microsoft Word, click on oh, ... anyway, two clicks somewhere get you to a list of languages, two of which are"English UK" and "English US."[/nq]
It might say "English UK" but it doesn't mean it is. Anyway, mine keeps mysteriously reverting to the other version without asking permission.
Philip Eden

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]WORD POWER WE asked the writers below for the correct spellings of the following words: diarrhoea, accommodation, inoculate, supersede, liaison.[/nq]
Hmm, I always spell it 'innoculate', which seems to be considered correct.
'Accommodation' is so poorly spelled on the Web, that when searching for it, it's always worth trying out various numbers of c's and m's.

Dylan

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]WE asked the writers below for the correct spellings of the following words: diarrhoea, accommodation, inoculate, supersede, liaison.[/nq]
[nq:1]'Accommodation' is so poorly spelled on the Web, that when searching for it, it's always worth trying out various numbers of c's and m's.[/nq]
Regrettably, so is "inoculate"...
[nq:1]Hmm, I always spell it 'innoculate', which seems to be considered correct.[/nq]
Which dictionaries consider "innoculate" correct?
"Innoculate" is a widespread virus. I've just Googled for the -e, -ed, -es, -ing, -ion, -ions inflections of the correct spelling and 3 variants, and found:
inoculate (etc.) 74600 67%
innoculate (etc.) 36200 32% innocculate (etc.) 158 0.14%
Even more worryingly, if you Google for "innocculate", Google asks you "Did you mean 'innoculate'".

Richard Sabey Visit the r.p.crosswords competition website cryptic fan at hotmail.com http://www.rsabey.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/rpc/

Times article on spelling

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