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Such slips do happen. When US marines went into Somalia in 1992, they bemused the locals by dropping leaflets that contained a spelling mistake in the local language: it described the marines as a “slave force” rather than a “world force”. Hardly endearing.

Other errors have worked more positively. In 2000 Australian customs officers seized 250lb of black cocaine after they became suspicious of crates labelled “arganick” fertiliser. If the shipper could not spell organic, thought one officer, something else might be amiss.

It is not even beyond the bounds of possibility that a spelling error could alter the course of history. In the present power struggle in Ukraine, one candidate for the presidency has mocked his rival for being unable to spell the word professor. In 1992 the American vice-president Dan Quayle famously misspelt potato. Would you vote for someone who cannot spell? The Labour government certainly believes spelling to be important and in 2001 it dispatched to schools a list of 700 words that every pupil ought to know how to spell. It included such treacherous entries as embarrass, accommodation and onomatopoeia.

Though almost a quarter of children still leave school unable to read or write properly, the drive to improve literacy has pushed up standards. Certainly many children are now better spellers than the education department civil servant who sent out 48,000 posters promoting literacy. They had to be withdrawn, at a cost of £6,000, because they contained two spelling errors.

So that’s settled: proper spelling is important and errors are troublesome. Except that it’s not so simple. English is a living, breeding, mutating language and deciding where proper spelling begins and ends is far from easy.

As Andrew Jackson, US president from 1829 to 1837, once said: “It is a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word.” Over the years some words have been left with alternative forms and others with unnecessary oddities. Take the “b” in debt. Though the word originates from the Latin debere, it comes via the Old French dette. Do we really need that awkward, silent “b” that was put back in later? As Wells points out: “Our spelling comes from a variety of etymological roots, sheer cussedness and sad accidents of history.”

The word scissors, for example, started out as sisoures and moved through sisours, sycers and other forms before ending up where it is today. Somehow a “c” (s)nipped in near the beginning. Even Shakespeare’s name has had different spellings at different times, from Shakspere to Shaxberd.

The result is a complicated system in which the same letter can have different sounds, while same-sounding words can have different meanings. Such talent for linguistic fecundity is still with us, helping the language evolve — but also keeping alive campaigns to have the spelling system simplified.

George Bernard Shaw was so infuriated by English that he suggested starting again with a new alphabet. And in fact in the 1960s campaigners persuaded the government to run a pilot project in primary schools using a modified alphabet.

“It worked well, but the government terminated it after a couple of years,” said John Gledhill, membership “secretery” of the Simplified Spelling Society. He claims that countries with simple spelling, such as Italy and Spain, have high rates of literacy, while English-speaking countries generally have some of the worst.

The society believes we should adopt a more phonetic approach and declares that it is “werking for pland chanje in english spelling for the bennefit of lerners and uzers evrywair”.

Although wholesale reform might seem a mountainous task, it does occasionally happen. The most striking example is that of Turkey, which scrapped Arabic script and adopted the Latin alphabet. The Dutch, too, have tried to simplify what they splendidly call “bastaardwoorden” borrowed from other languages; and the French have had a crack at reforming plurals and circumflexes.

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