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.
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