Nicholas Bodley recently said:

> Nevertheless, one indulgence is what I take to be a progressive
> decline, over perhaps the past century, in general ability to spell.
>
> When a teen-ager insists that "ravalio" is the correct spelling
> for "ravioli", that's not good, nor is "Thankvinks" (a holiday
> in the USA, celebrated in November).

Some people have dyslexia, which can cause problems.

> Some time back, I asked myself, "What's the next stage in this
> decline?" My logical answer was, inability to write letters and
> numerals with generally-accepted shapes. In my experience,
> instances are still rare. One was a badly-malformed script "a"
> in quite-elegant polychrome + metallic lettering on the cab door
> of a construction company truck. It was about the same on both
> sides. Some time back, a multi-day presentation that repeatedly
> used the Greek letter alpha had an unrecognizable glyph.

I do wonder about the influence of companies on spelling. English spelling
allows many varients to have the same sound. Companies misspell words so
that they can be used as a trademark. Graphic designers write the company
name with distinctive letter forms to form a logo and in some cases distort
the letters so much that they can only be deduced from the context.
Sometimes letters from other scripts are used, especially from Greek, but
the letters are used for their resemblence of a Latin letter rather than the
true phonetic value.

> Nevertheless, my contention about decline is probably bogus
> to some degree; I no longer notice scrambled-case hand lettering
> (MIIK, TrucKing), which is good.

Spelling is sometimes used to maintain a cultural distinction. For example
the cOOl dOOdz style of spelling that was (is?) popular amoung some
teenagers. People are very sensitive about how their surnames are spelt.
This even applies in Japan where people can prefer a particular graphical
varient of the character representing their name.

> For a longer-term perspective, surely letter (and numeral) forms
> have not been static over time, and we might just be seeing the
> beginnings of a Great Glyph Shift...

I would say that letter shapes have changed significantly in the past and
that printing has helped to stablise them. Fonts don't vary much from the
basic concept. (The lower case letter a has two different forms with the
handwritten style mostly appearing in italic fonts.)

Tim


--
Tim Partridge. Any opinions expressed are mine only and not those of my employer