Do correct spellings matter at all? not? nought?

A few items as follow-up to my earlier blog on the English language:

In Arizona, "Two self-anointed "grammar vigilantes" who toured the nation removing typos from public signs have been banned from national parks after vandalizing a historic marker at the Grand Canyon." These guys ought to have known better; after all, the British are still wondering why our spelling of "honor" is acceptable :-)

Speaking of the British, maybe the grammar vigilantes ought to have listened to the British academic who says that we should welcome these typos as variations in spellings. According to this report in the Times, "Instead of complaining about the state of education as he corrects the same spelling mistakes in undergraduate essays year after year, Ken Smith, a criminologist at Bucks New University, has a much simpler solution. “Either we go on beating ourselves and our students up over this problem, or we simply give everyone a break and accept these variant spellings as such.”

My first thought was, "why is a criminologist advising us about grammar?" But, the Arizona "grammar vigilantes" make it clear that obsessing with spellings can make criminals out of us. So, maybe this British criminologist was on to something :-)

Anyway, this grammarian/criminologist managed to create quite a stir throughout the world. Apparently it became a serious debate in India, as this pro and counter arguments show. And one writer opines that Indian students are better in English than the English are.

All because of spelling?

Save the whales, er, males that is!

Men have been domesticated to within an inch of their lives, attending Lamaze classes, counting contractions, bottling expressed breast milk for midnight feedings – I expect men to start lactating before I finish this sentence – yet they are treated most unfairly in the areas of reproduction and parenting.

Very funny paragraph in that excerpt from the Times piece, which is an extract from Kathleen Parker's book, Save the Males.

I expect gender issues to come up a lot more over the next couple of decades. How societies--here in America and elsewhere--deal with that will have profound impacts in a number of ways. There is something happening here.

All the more the reason to be reminded of a piece that was in Slate a long time ago--well, in 2004--that reviewed Bastards on the couch. An excerpt: The bastards' stories make clear that they know better than to believe in quick, across-the-board fixes. Nor do they seem to set much store by a one-size-fits-all diagnosis of the problem. There's plenty of tinkering, not just talking, ahead for all us—and aren't men famously good at that?

If you liked that, then read the other piece on The Bitch in the House. Excerpt: "Every woman I know is mad at her husband, just mad mad mad at everything," a friend informs Cathi Hanauer, the editor of the best-selling anthology The Bitch in the House (subtitled 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage) .... "Why … hadn't I been warned of this—the loss of identity, the potential claustrophobia, the feeling of being utterly trapped?"