Pity the poor undergraduate who falls into the clutches of Professor Bernard Lamb. The youths might be wizards at genetics but if their spelling is shaky Professor Lamb will provide strict correction. It’s for their own good. Some undergraduates can’t even spell Hardy-Weinberg! Either they forget the hyphen, he notes, or they make it Weinburg.
When I asked my husband who Hardy-Weinberg was, he laughed, a little unkindly I thought. It isn’t a he it is a they: G.H. Hardy and Wilhelm Weinberg, who noticed something interesting about alleles and genotypes. Anyway, a third of British undergraduates failed the Hardy-Weinberg test, whereas only an eighth of foreign undergraduates did.
Professor Lamb, the president of the Queen’s English Society, was banging on about this comparative weakness of native English spellers recently on the wireless, but he reported the same thing in 1998, in the journal of the Simplified Spelling Society.
If the Queen’s English Society, with its tendency to hyper-correct usage, is tiresome, the Simplified Spelling Society is a nut cutlet in the world of grammar. The society, founded in 1908, has changed its name to the Spelling Society, and its aims now are: ‘1) To raise awareness of the problems caused by the irregularity of English spelling. 2) To promote remedies to improve literacy, including spelling reform.’ But would spelling reform improve literacy? The history of the (Simplified) Spelling Society is littered with the wrecks of schemes to avoid the horrors of people misspelling occurrence, separate or miniature. In the mid-1980s, Cut Spelling was a contender. This system left out unnecessary letters, so that tealeaves became teleavs; whiskey or whisky became wisky, beauty buty; whose hos; abdomen abdmn; and aye, rather surprisingly, y. Prose written in this convention looks like the work of Daisy Ashford.
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