Jenkins all moast rite shok - butt hees stil stuk inn thee passed.

At first glance I thought that I agreed with Simon Jenkins’s piece in the Guardian today. This was A Bit Of A Shock because, as Hughes Views’s many fans will know, I usually find his writing to be borderline sentimental nonsense.

However even today’s piece harks back to a bygone age. He writes about English spelling, its difficulties, illogicality and the pedantry it can induce. Being a dreadful speller I might be expected to agree. Spelling ability depends on a certain sort of memory that I don’t posses a lot of. So I was always hopeless at school spelling tests.

School spelling tests are about a useful way of judging overall intelligence and ability as history or science exams were in the bad old days when being able to remember dates, the names of Kings, the periodic table or ohms law was pretty much all that was needed to pass. So they’re not very useful.

But technology has come to our rescue. Spell checker revolutionised my life. I can type garbage like this and be confident that any spelling mistakes it contains are ones that I’ve included deliberately for comic or dramatic effect or affect (even tho I can spell both these words I can never really remember their different meanings).

So sorry Simon, you’re ten years out of date. Not bad for you though, it’s usually at least fifty..