It’s less likely than you think, especially if you’re a first-year college student.
Ken Smith, at Bucks New University, is only the latest to suggest that orthographic regularity and good grammar are things of the past, and should be treated as such. This old chestnut pops up every few years and is promptly shut down again, thankfully, unlike such grammar-school atrocities as teaching reading through word recognition, which comes into vogue like very slow clockwork every fifteen years or so.
Many of the English spelling conventions decried by the spelling-challenged come directly from my beloved Greek (the word phonetic itself cannot be spelled phonetically, as wags often note, because it’s based on φωνη). However, even were I not a classicist, as someone who has had the duty of grading hundreds of first-year essays every year, I cannot see the virtues of accepting phonetic spellings for commonly-used words as clearly as Professor Smith does. I cannot imagine how much longer it would take to decipher my students’ essays if I did not hold them to ordinary spelling and grammar conventions. The amazing misspellings I have sometimes seen in essays, despite the ready availability of spellcheck, attest to that. Orthographic regularity is not an old-fashioned constraint on modern freedom of expression: it is a kindness to your readers.
I will, however, admit to an awful joy in first-year malapropisms. The drop-down thesaurus, coupled with an insufficient grasp of the nuances of vocabulary and an unwillingness to look up words in the dictionary, provides a great deal of amusement during a long night of grading.
