by Doug Rees

Created on: November 27, 2010   Last Updated: November 28, 2010

Andrew Jackson once said:  "It's a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word."  By that reckoning, Jackson himself had a very good mind, full of lexiconic creativity.  So too do many people who go online to express their thoughts.  Until I went on the Internet, I never knew there were so many people who couldn't spell the word "the".  I mean, this isn't some strange, difficult, or exotic word.  It's the most common word in the English language.  Yet, time after time, I have seen it written "teh".  I have also seen such things as "aloud" for "allowed" and "band" for "banned".  It got me thinking:  does it really matter?

My candid, straightforward answer is:  yes and no.  Language is a vehicle for human communication; and, rightly or wrongly, English is becoming the world's lingua franca.  It comes, essentially, in two flavours:  "British" English and "American" English (with many variants of each), differing in both spelling and punctuation.  But there has never been an English equivalent of the Académie Française, forcing the language into a rigid mould.  For better or worse, English is a linguistic weed - constantly changing, adapting, and growing in new directions.  It combines with other languages in an utterly promiscuous fashion, and just about anybody can invent new words.  It also has a whole "underground vocabulary" consisting of words that are banned in polite conversation, but nonetheless persist and even proliferate in "vulgar" speech.  For those of us who enjoy a little anarchy, and feel that liberty isn't real unless it contains a bit of licence, English is a dream.  For the world's purists, it's a nightmare.

There is both an upside and a downside to all this permissiveness.  Probably more than any other language, English is capable of keeping up with the world's technological changes.  Just as soon as something new gets invented, English adapts to it.  But there's a downside as well.  As it changes and adapts, English loses much of its precision.  We can say more about more things than speakers of any other language, but we can say them less precisely.

Consider the word "terrible".  It used to mean "inspiring terror", a useful concept; but it has long since become just another in the endless list of synonyms for "bad".  Consider also the words "disinterested" and "uninterested". 

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