The very existence of English spelling bees is often employed as ammunition for spelling reform proponents. English exhibits and accepts incredible variation, and I needn’t give any other examples than this very paragraph, in which, for instance, English and variation employ a two-consonant combination and a consonant-vowel combination to communicate the sh sound. And the spelling of vary can very (or vice versa . . .).

The negatives of spelling reform are:

1) First, first, first and first–it won’t happen. I attribute the impossibility of sweeping change to such factors as pure inertia (witness the success of the U.S. trying to dictate a change to the metric system in the last millennium). Add disagreement over the best reform system–do we accept Ben Franklin’s view that we actually eliminate C, J, Q, W, X and Y from the alphabet? Or do we keep C and adopt the list of 300 respellings dictated by Teddy Roosevelt (who couldn’t even spell his own name phonetically), including, within the context of this discussion, the deliciously appropriate accurst and clipt.

What’s more, even the most successful revamp of spelling–Noah Webster’s work to make the States as linguistically independent from from the Mother Isle as we were politically–gave us little more than fewer instances of U (of which I am in favour), jail instead of gaol (wow! momentous, that, or should I say momentos), and the somewhat less logickal departure of the letter k from words like musick and magick.

2) Successful total spelling reform would render English texts–perhaps even any written today–virtually unreadable within a few generations. The difficulty in reading Chaucer in the original, for instance, lies almost as much in spelling changes as it does in changed meanings and obsolete vocabulary. That’s re-formation, not reformation.

3) Spelling reform would wash the language’s inherent recognition of its linguistic diversity. Change technique to tekneek and the French influence fades from view, to be replaced by a some Nordic cast (or Nordik kast, if you must). To reinforce the point, consider the Scandinavian word skosh–which, because everything we know about English is wrong–is not Scandinavian at all. It’s Japanese. And we see other such fading. How many of us see the Arabic lineage in that pesky high school mathematical study, al-jabr, spelled algebra in English?

Factor 3 is one reason I’m intrigued that 2008 Bee winner Sameer Mishra is aspiring (at 13 years old, yet) to become a neurosurgeon. With his impressive mastery of English spelling, he is already performing a figurative surgery–dissecting and reconstructing the very DNA of this language, vastly rich in origin, nuance and texture.

And, oh yeah, a fourth reason sweeping spelling change won’t happen:

4) Spelling reform would eliminate the televised broadcast of the National Spelling Bee, with its low production costs and high ad revenue. Leave it to a network labeled ABC to continue to govern how we manage our A-B-C’s.