the lemonade is in the fridge!
just bring Enya!
You can both jump off the porch.
It can’t be much more than 14 feet or so…last one to break something wins
Alcohol-free lemonade? Didn’t know there was any other kind. I don’t believe I’ve ever had alcohol-unfree lemonade. I guess I need to live a little.
Oops. I guess I have to retract that statement.
Honestly, I never consided Mike’s to be lemonade-with-alcohol, but alcohol-with-lemonade. Well, I think there’s a difference. 
You are being too kind, Nano.
As Wild Bill Watkins is wont to say, “I blame me mum.”
Jack is correct: All living languages change with time, and spelling* is one of the places linguistic change can show up.
“Correct” spellings are a fuzzy set. What’s ‘correct’ is the way most people write it most of the time. In fact, that’s true of all the other things which change in any language: ‘right’ is what the consensus says is right, and that shifts over time. Sticking by the old ‘correct’ too long can be as much a barrier to clarity as jumping to the new too soon.
*grammar, pronounciation, lexicon (the list of words), orthography (how they’re written, ie letterforms themselves) & syntax are some of the others.
Ever whut yew say!
Well, s1m0n (you do know how awkward it is for a keyboard hack like me to type your nick out, don’t you? ), you may agree with Jack. That’s fine, but I wouldn’t go so far out on a limb as to call him “correct”.
Of course. I never disagreed with any of this. Still, I note that you yourself drew a distinction between language and spelling, above. One is not the other, they are not interchangeable, and they are not inseparable.
You say spelling may reflect linguistic change, but honestly, to me that’s a biiiiiiiig stretch. Speech is the thing itself. Writing (and spelling) are only conveyances, nothing more. A relationship does not a symbiosis make, otherwise how do we account for the illiterate?
Thanks! 
I know I’m right. And that Nanohedron apparently has no idea what he’s saying, and it’s kind of hard to argu(e) with that.
Nanohedron, ask any professional linguist (somebody who studies the concepts of language academically, not necessarily somebody who speaks many languages) and she or he will tell you I’m right. I promise.
Right about what? That one equals the other? That in discussing one, one must give equal weight and time to the other? Funny, but that looks like a politically correct tyranny to me. Jack, this thread from its inception has been about spelling. Not language. One can discuss them as separate entities. You seem to be quite willing to confuse this.
No. YOU have no idea what I’m saying. I’m quite clear about me.
No, no, we’re going to MY porch.
They may or may not be separate issues, but even were we to say they’re separate, they’re at the very least very closely related to one another. You can’t have spelling without English, and you can’t have English (as we know it today) without spelling it.
or pompous.
So if your child comes home from first grade with a spelling test with “mlik” marked as incorrect, you’ll have words with the teacher? Do you want teachers to point out words spelled incorrectly through grade school? How about high school? I mean, at what point do we say, “Oh well, looks like Eddie is going to always spell milk that way, no big deal.” The article I first linked is quoting a college professor who wants to quit worrying about his students’ spelling–says it takes too much time. It seems to me that by the time a kid gets to college, spelling errors should be few and far between. And I don’t think we should say to a youngster in the 8th grade that spelling only matters if he/she is going into medicine–if they plan on working construction, it doesn’t matter. Why not encourage proper spelling right from the start and not just wave it away as “language changes?”
Susan
He also calls people “counselor” all the damn time. That annoys me and is part of the reason I no longer watch his show.
I have known more than one person who natively spoke perfectly passable modern English, yet was stone-illiterate, so you won’t be convincing me any time soon of that.
You’re not thinking correctly. The direction of sounds-to-symbols goes both ways: something sounds one way, so you write it a certain way. You see symbols of a word you have never encountered before, so you make a guess as to how it’s pronounced. It’s really very simple.
What happened to palm piss? 