» National Spelling Bee Brings Out Protesters Who R Thru With Through
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Rebecca Dana sums up the latest in an epochs-long, inconsistently waged war for phonetic spellings, warmed over anew by the National Spelling Bee press coverage:
A fyoo duhzen ambishuhss intelectchooals, a handful ov British skool teechers and wuhn rokit siuhntist ar triing to chang the way we spel.
While this scheme has flaws, such as extant dialectal pronunciation tics, it would flatten the on-ramp to fluency. Still, I think there’s something… for lack of a better term, romantic, about our hodgepodge English tongue, gently frayed by time, geographic dispersion and vernacular encroachments - that merits unobtrusive cultivation.