Can You Instantly Identify a Misspelled Word?
When a leading Oxford academic suggested that using “thru” or “lite” wasn’t a grave wrongdoing, there were reportedly “gasps of shock” from the audience at the Hay Festival last year.
Simon Horbin, an English professor at Magdalen College, had touched upon one theme that along with grammar, punctuation, the weather and tea, seems to fire up many in Britain today.
Indeed, the comments at the bottom of the article revealed polarised points of view.
“So long as our education system is inhabited by people such as this so called ‘professor’ then our education system will remain a shambles.”
“When making pronouncements of this sort, liberal professors at the great seats of learning fail to appreciate that, in less elevated educational environments, these remarks simply serve to make people feel comfortable with low standards.”
“Many of the spellings which are now regarded as ‘correct’ are so merely because they have become enshrined in dictionaries, despite defying logic, alphabetic consistency and common sense.”
During his controversial speech, Prof Horbin went on to explain: “People like to artificially constrain language change. For some reason we think spelling should be entirely fixed and never changed. I am not saying we should just spell freely, but sometimes we have to accept spellings change.”
These views were echoed a few months later by Sugata Mitra, professor of educational technology at Newcastle University.
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