15 July 2020

I have decided to give myself a little project, during this time of coronavirus.

No – not the house renovations, or writing a daily blog. My project will be to sort out the English language. Specifically spelling. Let’s leave grammar alone – that’s important!

It struck me the other day that we have a lot of unnecessary letters in our words, which don’t achieve anything apart from using up ink (for those who actually use pens to write stuff nowadays), computer keyboards, or excess finger usage by those who type in iPads or phones.

It’s totly unecesary.

Don’t get me started on the duble leters in words ware they arnt needed. Ok double e is a difrent sound to a singl e, so I wil alow that one.

Pepl lurning inglish often have dificulty with our speling, particly with the silent leters. Imagin if they took a speling test on a wensday. They had bekfst befor the test of corse. They had bred and buta and Vegemite (no simplifying that one!). Their nees wer shaking with the presher of parsing the test. They thort they were going to go ok until they hurd the wurds they had to spel: onomatopoeia, dilate, accommodate, conscientious and diarrhoea.

And we could Australianise our spelling, to match our pronunciation of local words. Imagine if tourists didn’t have to decide whether Melbourne is pronounced Melburn, or Melborn – if we spelled the capital of Victoria simply as Melbn, I’m sure they would work it out. In WA, locals who pronounce Mandurah as Mandra will be happy. And let’s face it, while I am changing things around, Busselton is always known as Busso so why don’t we just change it totally! (Maybe Buso? To save ink?) Likewise Freo for Fremantle. And please please please can we change the spelling of Cockburn to Coburn???

You can play your part in my grand design to simplify the spelling of the English language. Give me a word that needs to change and I’ll see what I can do 🙂