My Grammar and I (Or Should That Be 'Me'?): Old-School Ways to Sharpen Your English

ABC:
E
ASY AS
123 (
OR
, S
PELLING
)
‘My spelling is Wobbly. It’s good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get
in the wrong places.’
A. A. M
ILNE
, Winnie the Pooh
In the late 1500s, the state of English spelling and the ‘invasion’ of foreign
words was troubling scholars and schoolteachers to the extent that some of them
took it upon themselves to harness the language by compiling dictionaries. But
even  with  the  help  of  education  and  dictionaries,  spelling  can  still  be  an  uphill
climb.
Smart Alec: More than one-tenth of English words are not spelled the way they
sound.
We have an overwhelming tendency to leave letters in words even though they
are no longer pronounced (think of the g in weight or daughter , for example, or
the b in subtle , or the p in pneumonia ). And we are surely the only language to
have nine ways to pronounce a single four-letter combination:
A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of
Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.
Then  we  have  things  called  eye  rhymes  ,  which  are  words  that  look  alike  and
perhaps used to rhyme but which, due to shifts in pronunciation, no longer do. In
Shakespeare’s day ,
Blow, blow thou winter wind
Thou art not so unkind
would probably have rhymed, as would

---

I am monarch of all I survey…
From the centre all round to the sea
when Cowper wrote those lines nearly two hundred years later.
Then  there  is  another  problem.  Many  words  that  sound  the  same  are  spelled
differently.
aloud/allowedfair/farepale/pail
beach/beech knot/notplane/plain
which  makes  English  a  wonderful  language  for  puns  but  a  nightmare  for  non-
native speakers and for those who aren’t confident in their spelling (or who rely
on their spellcheckers).
‘They went and told the sexton, and The sexton toll’d the bell.’