It seems I may have to take back some of what I have written above as the mortal sin of elitism has been compounded and made yet more heinous in the time it took (poor me) to write it.
Ye purists are wrong.
A statement that deserves a line to itself and yet it does not go far enough. Ye are more than wrong!!!
This nonsense rears it's ugly pate time and again in talk of both writing and arithmetic. The vaunted superiority of learning by rote and bleeding at the ears...give me strength!
It has not been either brains or dexterity that have put the human race in the driving seat of the Earth, but IDEAS!
The list of names of those who have changed and rechanged and have formed the world in which we live and yet could not spell and could not give a rat's colon for a semi, conjunction, subordinate and the rest is endless.
Shakespeare too would have died unheard of if instead of pouring forth for all he was worth he had been bogged down by the sheer stupidity of those who have but the littlest learning.
The vast majority of the writers of today; the popular, the oft read and the most learned hand their masterpieces to such mere drudges as can spell and Pollock-spray the text with the widgets of punctuation. It is these drones that once filled the suburban railways with brief-case and brolly while the men and women with the art if not the artifice Sunned themselves in San Tropez.
Bottoms up, what.
