Spelling Blues
Drunkenness, liaison, vacuum and armadillo. This is not a story about the sexual misadventures of a troubled adolescent, but in fact news that Oxford’s spelling ability is second best of all cities in the country. These troublesome words were among the 13 used to test the nation in a survey conducted by publishers Bookforce UK. Manchester came first with an average score of 77 per cent, whilst Oxford scored 69 per cent.
Bookforce found it impossible to find a perfect speller, although The Oxford Student has discovered the first person not to have misspelled a single one of the words. Deborah Cameron, Professor of Language and Linguistics at Worcester, is pragmatic about her superhuman powers. “I’d take these surveys with more than a grain of salt … Most literate people never could spell with 100 per cent accuracy.
“The source of the delusion that accurate spelling is ‘normal’ is our exposure to published printed text, which has been professionally edited to remove the errors most writers make.” Suspicious that Manchester scored higher than Oxford, we thought it ‘necessary’ to test Rob Lewis, Mancunian Editor of The Oxford Student. After struggling with diarrhoea, Lewis wiped the slate clean with a score of 85 per cent.
James Wise, also from Manchester, scored lower than Belfast with a far from acceptable 46 per cent. The Vice-President of Christ Church JCR failed to spell accommodation, jewellery and five others, leaving his conscience far from clear.
27th Oct 2005