English spelling seen as "truely atrosious"

By Luke Baker

LONDON (Reuters) - Embaressed by yor spelling? Never you mind.

Fed up with his students' complete inability to spell common English correctly, an academic has suggested it may be time to accept "variant spellings" as legitimate.

Rather than grammarians getting in a huff about "argument" being spelled "arguement" or "opportunity" as "opertunity", why not accept anything that's phonetically (fonetickly anyone?) correct as long as it can be understood?

***Have your say on spelling here***

"Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I've got a better idea," Ken Smith, a criminology lecturer at Bucks New University, wrote in the Times Higher Education Supplement.

"University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell."

To kickstart his proposal, Smith suggested 10 common misspellings that should immediately be accepted into the pantheon of variants, including "ignor", "occured", "thier", "truely", "speach" and "twelth" (it should be "twelfth").

Then of course there are words like "misspelt" (often spelled "mispelt"), not to mention "varient", a commonly used variant of "variant".