The magic of spelling

It's interesting to see how much the written word has become ingrained as part of our spoken language - we talk about people dropping their gs from words like going and something (even though technically speaking, people who pronounce those words 'properly' aren't even making a g sound) and we look to the written word to see if words count as "real words" despite using them in everyday speech. Just play a game of Scrabble and try to put down emo or temp (as in a temporary office employee) - The look of indignation on the other player's faces will show you how strongly people feel about the written word. 

It's hard to believe that in Ye Olde times (that's the official term for that era, by the way) it was the majority of the population that couldn't read or write, and so the few who could actually read and write were seen to have magical powers. The word grammar actually has the same word origin as glamour for this reason; glamour meant "magical spell" before moving to meaning it has today. From a Ye Olde regular person's perspective, it's understandable- People who could read were able to speak words that may not have been uttered for years, and had access to a heap of information that regular people couldn't. For most people, this would have meant that they potential had access to spells and witchery.

However, up until fairly recently, those who could read at that time may not have been able to spell - well, not by our standards anyway. It was common to see a word being spelt a number of ways - even in the same passage written by the same person. Before we could all just Ctrl+J in Microsoft Word to justify text, people would just change an i to a y or add another s or two at the end of words. 

I guess Scrabble would have been so much easier in Ye Olde times.