A slice of lion – why spelling matters
We all need a hero sometimes. And for me, the vigilante who has taken to the streets of Bristol at night correcting punctuation on signs might just be that hero.
After all, someone has got to step up and correct our failing literacy standards, even if they don’t have the requisite mask and cape tucked away in the wardrobe. But in my view, the mysterious crusader against rogue apostrophes has missed a trick: what we really need out there, roaming the streets at night, is a spelling vigilante.
Take an experience my mother had at a restaurant recently. Noticing one of the dishes was listed, borderline biblically, as ‘lion of lamb’, she alerted the waiter. he peered at the menu, clapped his hand to his forehead and exclaimed: ‘Of course! It should be L-Y-O-N.’
sigh. This is what spelling has come to. Once the sort of thing you could get your knuckles rapped for at school, good spelling appears to have turned into an optional extra, like underfloor heating or bacon on a burger.
Indeed, I am reminded of yet another menu in a fish and chip shop which proudly proclaimed it served ‘glutton-free fish’. The mind boggles.
social media and the very immediate way in which we communicate today have an awful lot to do with it. Where once people would agonise for hours over penning a letter or a card (I remember as a child being taught to write a rough draft of any letter, double check it for spelling and grammar and then copy it out again in my best handwriting for the ‘good’ copy), now we send multiple messages a day with nary a thought for how we spell even the most basic words.
Of course this can have disastrous consequences. Pity the woman for example, who took to Twitter to inform the world: ‘I smell like men’s colon.’ Or the man who declared that he wanted to visit the ‘ifold tower in France’. With spelling like that pal, I think you’re best off staying at home.
MOsT alarmingly it has almost – shiver – become cool to be a poor speller, as if one’s mind should be on loftier matters, such as what to order at Nando’s or which Kardashian to unfollow on Instagram. Okayz?
so how then, to make spelling cool again? how to banish the ever present emojis and bring back good old fashioned, properly spelled language?
In America they have spelling bees, where children compete fiercely over how to spell words such as ‘eudaemonic’ and ‘vivisepulture’ (answer? Very, very carefully). It’s a phenomenon that has taken off here recently, and so I can only hope that for the generation of children today, the ones just starting out, there might be hope. Otherwise, we better get used to seeing a lot more lyons of lamb on the menu.