Spelt out

Should we really care that our children cannot spell Shakespeare's name correctly? After all, neither could the great playwright himself. He used three different variants – Shakspere, Shakspeare, and Shakespeare. And as for not being able to spell Jane Austen, that novelist spelt stopped as stopt, scissors as scissars, and sofa as sopha. In fact, it wasn't until Austen's near contemporary, Samuel Johnson, published his Dictionary in 1775 that standardised spelling became a possibility, let alone a way of torturing school children, judging scrabble entries and filling in crosswords. Yes, we too can see the practical advantages of removing ambiguities, but would that be sufficient reason to give-in to that modern instrument of standardisation – the Microsoft Spell Checker – with its insistence that defence is spelt defense and humour as humor? No, let a thousand variants bloom, in spelling as in all other forms of life.