English author AA Milne – who conjured up Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh – once wrote: “My spelling is Wobbly. It’s good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.”
In South Africa, a team of our students is just the opposite: in April, they claimed the Africa Spelling Bee Championship title in Zimbabwe, ending Nigeria’s four-year reign as continental champions.
The team will carry that momentum to the Spelling Bee World Cup in Shanghai, China, next month.
Why, oh why, then, are many of us so rubbish at spelling?
Word unscrambling experts at Unscramblerer.com tracked Google and other internet searches for “how do you spell” and “how to spell” across more than 120 spelling search variations.
The results weren’t particularly flattering for us as a nation, because among the words we had no clue how to spell were “colour”, “favourite”, “beautiful”, “definitely” and even, believe it or not, “weather”.
In our defence, we would like to blame technology. Most of our devices – from PCs to phones – default to American English, that bastardised version of what the King uses.
And, should you really trust a nation which calls aluminium “aluminum”?
But AI makes it even wors (we think).
