And in my own defense I will add a personal observation, that some of the very BEST spellers write the very DULLEST stuff. It is as if the creative spark is doused with a deluge of cold water when its feet are too closely held to the fires of “proper spelling”. Concluding that some poor soul who does not spell a word exactly as the dictionary dictates is a fool, a dolt, and an uneducated bumbleton, is unfair in the extreme. As I have been wont to say myself in a journal written for my English class, “ It is no mark of great intelligence, in my mind, that one knows how to spell “pedantic”. It is more important to know what it MEANS.”
(The teacher heartily agreed)….
So without further ado, there follows a handful of quotes by our illustrious literary ancestor, the Mark Twain himself :
SPELLING
Why, there isn't a man who doesn't have to throw out about fifteen hundred words a day when he writes his letters because he can't spell them! It's like trying to do a St. Vitus dance with wooden legs.
- The Alphabet and Simplified Spelling speech, 12/9/1907
I have had an aversion to good spelling for sixty years and more, merely for the reason that when I was a boy there was not a thing I could do creditably except spell according to the book. It was a poor and mean distinction and I early learned to disenjoy it. I suppose that this is because the ability to spell correctly is a talent, not an acquirement. There is some dignity about an acquirement, because it is a product of your own labor. It is wages earned, whereas to be able to do a thing merely by the grace of God and not by your own effort transfers the distinction to our heavenly home--where possibly it is a matter of pride and satisfaction but it leaves you naked and bankrupt.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
I never had any large respect for good spelling. That is my feeling yet. Before the spelling-book came with its arbitrary forms, men unconsciously revealed shades of their characters and also added enlightening shades of expression to what they wrote by their spelling, and so it is possible that the spelling-book has been a doubtful benevolence to us.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
...simplified spelling is all right, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far.
- The Alphabet and Simplified Spelling speech, 12/9/1907
...ours is a mongrel language which started with a child's vocabulary of three hundred words, and now consists of two hundred and twenty-five thousand; the whole lot, with the exception of the original and legitimate three hundred, borrowed, stolen, smouched from every unwatched language under the sun, the spelling of each individual word of the lot locating the source of the theft and preserving the memory of the revered crime.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
And here, I rest my case.
All further misspellings on my part, are to be considered “unconsciously revealed shades of my character, and enlightened shades of expression.” And there’s an end of it.
*The to instead of too, I maintain is an "enlightened shade of expression."
You are now free to move about the country.
I know a man who didn't get his Masters Degree because he took SO long to hand in his work that the powers that were told him to buzz off. He was a perfectionist and didn't want to hand in anything that might have an error in it. So he handed in nothing at all and got nothing at all for it. Again..... I rest my case..... :-) !!!!
(I LOVE you guys..... you know that......)