Spelling

There's a human interest story in today's Globe where the writer -- apparently tongue in cheek -- suggests abandoning spelling conventions because too many people misspell words.

Seeing as how almost all documents are now produced electronically and how spell-checkers are ubiquitous it seems odd for spelling errors to be coming up now as opposed to, say, twenty years ago.

That said, remember our current spelling conventions are merely the result of 19th Century style guides and dictionaries. Read Blackstone, for example, in an 18th Century edition and you will see "it's" used to denote a possessive. And Blackstone was hardly uneducated.

However, reading speed is kept up by following convention -- who would read 'ghoti' as 'fish'? In today's world of texting and signs on high speed roads keeping reading as simple as possible is important.

So my vote -- let's keep speeling words write!