English spelling is a jungle. Pleese abreviate bannister and batallion. Wither the Meditteranean and Carribean, pray? I HATE desicate. What on earth shall we do about Britain, Brittany and Britannia? Tell you what. Let’s call the whole thing off. Wipe the dictionary clean, and start again, spelling words as they sound. That will remove grief from the classroom and Sturm und Drang from the public keyboard. Then in an orderly and logical world we can rely on spellcheck and get on with more important subjects such as sums. The economists need us.

Whoa there, Savanarola. Just think:

1. Just whose pronunciation is our new model spelling going to represent? Boston Brahmin or Memphis Tennessee? Or Ulster, where a lake means a hole in a kettle? Sounds change even in England. In Bristol and the West they sound both Rs in words like fraternity: you don’t hear that in southeast England. Glasgow, Belfast, Bristol speak quite different-sounding Englishes. And we haven’t included America in all its accents, Australia, South Africa and all the other Englishes.

2. OK. We’ve solved that, have we? Suppose we have decided to reform our spelling to represent the Queen’s English as spoken wather nasally by middle-class, public-school, Oxbridge speakers with fwogs in their thwoats. We shall destroy the connections between word families. Think of the confusion that will arise when we spell “fraternise” FRATT-uh-nise, whereas “fraternity” (very much in the same family) fruh-TERR-nity. The same brutal splitting of related words will strike widely: nation/national; sign/signature; adore/adoration.

2A. Where systematic differences occur between two varieties of English spelling (sc. British and American)

(eg, catalogue/catalog; humour/

humor; centre/center), the risk of misunderstanding is minimal.

3. The cost, my dear, the cost. The expense of republishing all existing literature in any new spelling would be immense. And then we would have to re-educate everybody above school age in the new spelling. It would be far harder than changing to driving on the right. It would take generations, and introduce anarchy.

4. The new model spelling would banish millions of literate people from the existing community of English-readers. Shakespeare was a liberal speller. He spelt his name in 27 (or was it 72?) different ways. But most schoolchildren can cope with his English as he spelt it. Do we want to ghettoise him and Chaucer and all the rest of our bold, brave, old spellers? Do we want to translate all previous books into the new spelling?

5. Spelling declares the roots of a word. Any child can see that “fatidical” means prophetic, fate-speaking. One of the minor reasons for studying Latin and Greek is that they often exhibit the roots of an English word. And if you don’t care for fatidical, you can have “prophesy” — Greek for “to speak before” (usually a God). There is no room to go into the roots of vaticinate and haruspex.

6. All that we can do is enjoy language. Follow the sherpas: “I before E except after C.” So what about “beige”, smartarse?

7. Spelling is beautiful. Believe it.

For full information about the Spelling Bee and how to enter go to timesonline.co.uk/spellingbee