Until I became a fan of The Beatles in around 2009, I always thought the word beetle (as in, insect) was spelled beatle. Even now, the ‘correct’ spelling looks strange to me and I guess that says a lot about the language; it is, after all, just nonsense. There is no reason one spelling of a word is right, and another wrong, other than the fact that a dictionary says so. In the past, a spelling which is incorrect today, may well have been one of the more common ones, not that the modern one would have been wrong, they just didn’t care. I guess that system had its upsides and its downsides: on the one hand, reading would probably hard if somebody was spelling the word ‘what’ as ‘whaghte’ but, on the other, there’d be much less need for proof reading. Also, by the way, wouldn’t it be cool to become so famous that your own version of a common word replaced the normal one in the minds of some people?
