GardenBanter.co.uk - View Single Post

Gunner Asch · 21-08-2008, 03:09 AM posted to sci.chem,rec.gardens,alt.survival,sci.environment

On Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:39:52 -0700,
(paghat) wrote:

Until one of the preditors gets hungry enough and comes looking for
long pig and you happen to be available.

A predator that doesn't know how to spell, apparently.

"Who can spell, can't write" -Mark Twain

"I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way" -
Mark Twain
--
Mark Twain on SPELLING

I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling
words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook all dishes
alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing. I have a
correspondent whose letters are always a refreshment to me, there is
such a breezy unfettered originality about his orthography. He always
spells Kow with a large K. Now that is just as good as to spell it
with a small one. It is better. It gives the imagination a broader
field, a wider scope. It suggests to the mind a grand, vague,
impressive new kind of a cow.
- speech at a spelling match, Hartford, Connecticut, May 12, 1875.
Reported in the Hartford Courant, May 13, 1875

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, December 9, 1907

....simplified spelling is all right, but, like chastity, you can carry
it too far.
- The Alphabet and Simplified Spelling speech, December 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

....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

Point, set and match, buffoon.

Gunner

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those
who in times of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality",
John F. Kennedy.