why beagles kan't spel

Your spelling looked a bit odd to me, but I thought what the hell, surely Beagles must know, so I used your version and sure enough that little red underline told me that I couldn’t do that, and as I recall even spellcheck wouldn’t help me out because it was too far off base. What I do in these situations is just google the word, and google has that thing where if you start out the word it will complete it for you.

But how much nicer it would be if we spoke some reasonable language instead of English? I remember maybe the first day in Spanish class when Senor Chadwick said everything in Spanish is spelled just the way it is written, and I was floored, what a concept? Do the other languages know about this?

And of course they do, and I believe most, if not all of them are, let’s call it phonetically spelled. So what’s the deal with English?

Well of course it is a mishmash of Latin and Germanic, but it seems to me that it goes beyond that. There are things like eight and ate, there are all these different sets of rules on how to make sounds applied willy nilly.

Then there is this thing where words are borrowed from other languages. But if you notice when other languages borrow words from English they respell them to make them phonetic in their language. We should be calling it lazay fair, maybe lahzay fare. Ah hell we need to rethink our rules on how to make sounds. Why should there be two different rules for making the same sounds, both rules I might add which are sometimes enforced and sometimes not for no particular reason.

Back when I was subbing and a kid asked why is two plus two four, I could pull four pennies from my pocket and divide them into two groups of two, and say, ‘See.” But if he asked how come eating was ate and the number was eight, I had to shrug my shoulders.

Well instead of blaming the internet and tv, I am going to blame education. Back in the days before the printing press, everybody knew how to speak the language, but only an elect few knew how to write it and since they were all educated they had learned the rules and they spelled well. And if they ever weren’t sure they could look at what some other guy had written and do it his way, and since the other guy was educated they could be pretty sure that he was right.

I’m kind of pulling this out of my ass, but I think England became literate sooner than the rest of Europe, because they were more industrialized and democratic, more people learned to write then in Europe at the time. But the problem with this is, that they weren’t all that educated so they didn’t really know the rules, so they just kind of made them up, spelled the word the way they figured it ought to be spelled, and other people saw how they spelled it and they followed them.

In the rest of Europe literacy came slower and more from the top down so the rules of spelling were more often obeyed.

That’s my theory as to why English is less phonetic than other languages. A lot of holes in it I noticed as I was writing it out, but that’s why you should write out the things that you believe, to see if they make any sense. I’m sure you agree.

Maybe we can get onto this instead of why don’t we invent this and why don’t we invent that, because inventing is not like building a road where all you need is some paving stones and some strong backs. Why don’t we just invent a machine that will keep the world clean and make it so that we never get sick and we never grow old?

I think generally people use climate change to mean global warming, it’s just a gentler, slightly deceptive, phrase, like the way a pol will call himself a progressive rather than a liberal, a word which the right has thoroughly trashed, even though they both pretty much mean the same thing.

I think the gov has sold off it’s GM stock, but I am going to leave it to you to figure it out, because why do I have to be the guy that always goes to wiki?