www.freespeling.com, where everyone can record how they would like to spell. My research at parties, conferences, and Ideal Home Exhibitions finds that people have two ideas about how they want to spell – one is fantasy and the other is reality. Fantasy is longing to be free to spell ‘sensibly’. Reality is the desire to be socially acceptable. A large number of research grants have been spent on the study of spelling mistakes. Dr Phillip Smith’s research on people’s ideas of spelling concluded that ‘the knowledge of spelling possessed by highly literate adults is likely to be a heterogeneous collection of generalisations’. In Victorian times, up to a third of primary schooling was taken up with spelling, but this dedication was acknowledged to be not always successful. I have a newspaper cutting complaining about the terribly low level of school leavers’ spelling in Ballarat – when it was still sometimes spelled Ballararat – dated 1870. Recently I found an old black-bound family book with the title Family Worship: a series of prayers with remarks on passages of sacred Scripture by clergymen of the Church of Scotland. Inside, facing the flyleaf, is a list of family birth-dates, beginning with Great-Grandfather Peter Keil, born 21st March 1818, and stopping at my grandfather’s birth in 1854. The inside cover is inscribed ‘Peter Keils Book’ and around the edge of the page is written at different angles in an antique hand the words ‘correspondence’ ‘suffocated suffocated’ ‘lonly lonely’, ‘lovlier lovelier’, ‘rely reely’, ‘hury ceas case’, ‘heaps heper’ and other attempts to spell that have faded into illegibility. The pages of this holy book were used to call down help in spelling by the familiar and often desperate tactic to ‘see if it looks right’.
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