Mr Smith, a criminology lecturer, said: "Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I've got a better idea.
"University teachers should simply accept as variant spellings those words our students most commonly misspell.
The funniest part of the article is the Have Your Say section, many of which say something along the lines of, "Down with spelling errers and Americanization!"
From a less glib standpoint, there are actually a lot of really interesting things going on in the comments. For one, the British perspective towards the degeneration of English apparently includes American English. According to these comments, it's equivalent to txtspeak or typos, a lazy way of writing that is worthy of pet peeve status. I had no idea. (Although, it's interesting to consider that in light of "Britpicking," a secondary level of editing done within certain fan communities, transforming American writers' words into something passably British.) Second, unlike what I imagine American comments to have been, the British are not concerned about typos so much as people phonetically writing like chavs. There's an element of what accent you have and what that says about you in Britain that, for the most part, does not seem to be that huge in the US. (I could be completely wrong about that, though. I am, after all, from the Midwest and still in the Midwest.)
Oh, and for the record, I can't say I agree with Mr. Smith on this one. It would hurt my soul a little bit, if varients -- ha, see what I did there?-- became accepted rather than ridiculed.
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