Professor Weary Of Making Corrections Suggests Overlooking Misspelled Words

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Sick and tired of spending hours correcting his students poor spelling, Dr. Ken Smith, a senior lecturer in criminology at Buckinghamshire New University, told the crowd gathered to hear him speak that we should merely ignore the errors, instead considering them "variants" of the correctly spelled word.
He uses the word "twelfth" as an example, and questions how the F even got placed within the spelling of the word in the first place.

'How on earth did that "f " get in there? You would not dream of spelling the words "stealth" or "wealth" with a "f" (as in 'stealfth' or "wealfth") so why insist on putting the "f" in twelfth?'.

He wants to have 20 of the most commonly misspelled words added to the dictionary, stating that in doing so teachers and professors everywhere would be able to stop beating themselves up over constantly attempting to correct the errors, and would be able to put to rest the need to teach their students the "correct" spelling of these words.

Dr. Smith is not asking that the spelling or misspelling be accepted as permanent, but his suggestion causes concern in literary circles over the future expectations of students working towards higher education degrees.

The 20 words Dr. Smith is suggesting be accepted into the "variant" hall of shame are as follows:



Dr Bernard Lamb lecturer at the prestigious Imperial College is equally troubled by the huge number of misspelled words he finds in the papers produced by his students. He is concerned that his homegrown British students are far less able to spell correctly than their foreign counterparts.

He blamed failure of the overall school system stating

'There was little evidence of students having been taught the relevant rules at school, or of the students having been corrected for obvious and frequent errors.'

In a national survey conducted by the Spelling Society it was found that 54 per cent of people couldn't spell words such as 'embarrassed', 'separate', 'accommodation', 'millennium' and 'friend'. But, with that said, the survey also determined that society in general does not support accepting misspelled words as "variants".

So where do you stand on this issue? Should spelling be a foregone issue? Do you think it is important that teachers correct and expect that their students remain concerned with proper spelling, or should we just consider such practices unnecessarily taxing and archaic?