The importance of being Earnest Hemminway, (or why spelling isn't that important)

My father used to say that the most difficult word to spell is the little yellow flower pronounced 'eskulsha' but spelt 'eschscholtzia'. Aged six, and keen to show off, I learned to spell it off by heart.

Sadly, I have spent the next 46 years repeating it over and over again to myself, but in all those 46 years, not a single person has ever asked me whether, by any chance, I know how to spell eschscholtzia.

It's now beginning to dawn on me that good spelling is really not very important.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (right) was unable to spell his friend Ernest Hemingway's name correctly

A new poll claimed that four out of ten people disagree with me, believing that those who can't spell are 'thick', while six out of ten admit to being poor spellers.

I am no statistician, but I suppose this means that all the good spellers think that all the bad spellers are thick. If only I could get my hands on phone numbers of all those good spellers, I'd be able to ring them up and say: 'OK, cleverclogs, so how do you spell "eschscholtzia"? Not so clever now, are you?'

The poll suggests that the most common misspelling is 'definately' for 'definitely'. I trust it's of some comfort to the poor old 'definately' lobby that F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, suffered from the very same trouble.

'Fitzgerald was a lamentable speller,' writes the editor of his Collected Letters, Andrew Turnbull. 'Following his ear, he habitually made such slips as "definate" and "critisism", and proper names were his downfall.' Fitzgerald frequently addressed his best friend, Ernest Hemingway, as 'Ernest Hemmingway' or even 'Earnest Hemminway'.

But bad spelling seems to have done him no harm: he still holds on to the reputation of being not just one of the greatest American authors, but also one of the most sophisticated (or sophistocated, as I usually spell it).

George Bernard Shaw used to get exasperated at the illogicality of English spelling. He pointed out that the word fish can be pronounced as ghoti, with the gh as in 'tough', o as in 'women' and ti as in 'nation'.



Before his death in 1950, the poor man bequeathed most of his estate to the promotion of spelling reform. Nearly 60 years on, I can't think of a single word that has had its spelling reformed.

Even if you count the sterling efforts made on Shaw's behalf by the pop group Slade, with hit records such as Cum On Feel The Noize and Coz I Luv You, it looks as though the combined efforts of George Bernard Shaw and Noddy Holder have come to nothing.

Perhaps Shaw might have been better off cutting corners and leaving his estate to the promotion of throwing money down drains.

The one great advantage of the complexity of English spelling is that it allows at least four out of every 10 people to feel good about themselves. In my experience, there is nothing keen spellers enjoy more than complaining about a spelling mistake.

Seeing the headline 'Thousands die in earthquayke', they will be infinitely more shocked by the unwanted 'y' than by the news that thousands have died.

Not long ago, Tony Blair spelt the word 'tomorrow' wrong three times in the course of a single letter to a by-election candidate. And poor spelling crosses party boundaries: the prompt-note for Margaret Thatcher's famous 1979 victory speech in which she quoted St Francis of Assisi shows that she misspelled despair 'dispair'.

But for those Daily Mail readers who worry the world is going downhill, it may be reassuring to know that the politicians of yesteryear were just as inept. Lord Palmerston once dictated a sentence to his Cabinet. It went like this: 'It is disagreeable to witness the embarrassment of a harassed pedlar gauging the symmetry of a peeled potato.' Not a single one of them managed to spell it correctly.



Phil's spectre sparks terror

The photo of Phil Spector in police custody against a measuring backdrop doesn't show him at his best.



The merciless prison photographer - no David Bailey he! - shows that, without his wig and his platform heels, Spector is bald and barely 5ft 4in tall. There but for the grace of God, etc.

Phil Spector is barely recognisable without his trademark wig in his recent prison mug shot, left

We have all of us developed ways of emphasising our best points and minimising our worst. Shorties may do a President Sarkozy and resort to elevator heels, or a discreet platform behind the podium. Baldies may don a toupee or even, like Phil Spector, a fullblown Struwwelpeter wig.



When our photographs come back from the printers, we may spend a great deal of time picking out the nice ones and discarding the awful.



But then the police photographer gets out his camera and our efforts are blown to the winds. There is no hiding place.

I have never imagined prison to be a bed of roses, but Phil Spector's depressing mugshot, circulated throughout the world, suggests that it now holds a fresh terror for us all.