Programme Outline
This programme presents some of the ways in which we put our knowledge of spelling to good use: in writing, obviously; in playing scrabble, where knowledge of prefixes and suffixes is very useful; and in spelling competitions.
Sean Hughes considers homophones, and a representative from the Simplified Spelling Society makes a case for dropping silent letters in words. A brief journey into the history of writing tells us that although we speak modern English, we write using much the same spelling that became fixed following the introduction of the printing press by Caxton in the fourteenth century.
New words come into the English language from many different sources, principally the media and particularly through advertising. The programme suggests that the biggest influence on spelling today is from the Internet, where acronyms such as IMHO (‘in my humble opinion’) are creating new words.
