A Noo Way Uv Spelling

While Anamika Veerami was busy correctly spelling "stromuhr" to take home the prize in the annual National Spelling Bee, protesters from the American Literacy Council were questioning why bother to learn spelling at all.

The folks at the ALC think English is crazy hard to learn because of its wacky spelling, and they'd like some standardization, and logic, applied. So enough with "enough"--their SoundSpel method would change that to "enuf," and a whole bunch of other words along with it.

I don't know, the ALC seems at least a decade late with their protest. What with email and Twitter and texting, abbeviated, phonetic and otherwise incorrect spelling has become an accepted norm anyway. What nitpicking is left keeps a few dozen editors and proofreaders gainfully employed, which, in this economy, is a good thing.

Besides, do we really need to be encouraging further laziness, and a further dumbing down of the curriculum. So what if spelling is hard. So is algebra, so is chemistry. It's called learning. Are we giving up on that altogether?

Kudos to Anamika. She wants to go to Harvard and become a surgeon. And I don't mean sirjun.