Cracking the Spelling Code

When people in other countries speak English, they usually translate it directly from their own language, which can lead to some strange sentences. The spelling of the UK and American versions of the English language diverged some time ago, when Benjamin Franklin, and other early Americans, “modernized” our spelling. Now scientists are asking why we can’t modernize it even more, to make it easier for kids to learn to read.

Darlene Superville writes in LiveScience.com that people who advocate more simplified spelling say it would help children learn to read faster. People have been trying to simplify the English language for centuries?both Andrew Carnegie and Theodore Roosevelt tried to do it around a century ago.

When we can’t spell something correctly, we get nervous, and when we get nervous, we crack our knuckles. What makes our knuckles “pop” when we crack them? The answer: gas.

Corey Binns writes in LiveScience.com that the popping sound comes from escaping gas bubbles. Most of our joints are protected by a protective fluid that is filled with gas, and stretching the joint releases some of it.

Your grandma always told you that cracking your knuckles would give you arthritis, but the truth is that scientists don’t think this is true, although they really don’t know, because they haven’t done many studies on it.

Meanwhile, until spelling is made simpler, we’ll just have to muddle through with our spellcheckers. But since there have been several popular films about spelling bees recently, this has given simplified spelling advocates new hope that the rest of us will see things their way. As they would put it, “Enuf is enuf.”

Art credit: freeimages.co.uk

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