Spelling Malarky

I have impressed myself beyond belief. I am writing the second blog and it is only the second day. This won't last long but it is a good start. I am enjoying it though, I have been thinking all day about this blog. What can i put in it? What shall i say? And nothing of note really came up.

I have, however, been questioning the point of silent letters. The only reason I can see in them is to catch out less educated people with their spelling. These less educated people includes me by the way. I started thinking about this due to finding out recently that the winged dinosaur is spelt 'Pterodactyl'. Seriously, what is the point of this P at the beginning?

Factually the P is there simply because the name derives from the Greek word Ptero, which literally means wing, but this still doesn't make any sense to me. We simply do not pronounce the P. And also what were the bloody Greeks doing putting a P before a T, they must have been mental. I wonder if the Greeks pronounced the P? I need to stop thinking about the Greeks now because it has all become a mess in my mind.

I love literacy but things like this seem to carry on the snobbery surrounding language. Why should people know there is a letter in a word if when reading it out loud you can't sodding hear it? Saying this i still very much detest text shorthand. Seeing a number eight within a word is horrific. I don't want to sound like a word snob though, because i am not. I hate reading on message boards etc. mocking other contributers about their spelling. Mis-spelling is fine, laziness to put a '2' instead of 'to', is not.

I will stop there though. I don't want to start sounding like my Granddad, who would have written a libraries worth on this. I can guarantee it.

I am going to go now and play a computer game. I had hopes the same as Richard Herring did when starting this internet word scribble, to try and use a blog to set me up to do writing afterwards, and like him, I am already finding this blog is the only writing i do.