Carect speeling

I have always held the late multi-talented Peter Ustinov in awe-ful respect. But in two matters, I give him less than full marks. The first is unimportant: it is just that I happen to think that David Suchet matches Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot much better than Ustinov did.

The second is much more serious and baffling.

In his autobiographical Dear Me Ustinov writes: "The insistence on accurate spelling at modern schools is an effort to invest a living language with rigor mortis". This seems to me to be about as silly a remark as an educated man could utter. Who does Ustinov believe is deliberately trying 'to invest our language with rigor mortis' ? By using an impersonal structure for his sentence ('insistence on accurate spelling' is the subject of the sentence) he craftily avoids identifying the guilty: is he referring to teachers, or syllabus-setters, or educationists, or our representatives in parliament, or society in general (of which presumably he sees himself a part) ?

Clearly, Ustinov the actor or public speaker could have achieved success regardless of spelling. But he made a significant part of his living from writing. His spelling (as it appears in print, anyway) is impeccable even if his thinking is sometimes illogical. If he had submitted to his publisher a MS or typescript that ran "The insistance in acrat speeling at modden scules is'n effert to invesst a liven langauge with rigger mortice", would it have been accepted ? If it were (perhaps because the content of the MS was otherwise so good), then we can be sure that Heinemann's editors would have cleaned up the spelling - presumably, if Ustinov is right, "in an effort to invest his (Ustinov's) living language with rigor mortis".

If we want to communicate with the rest of the world in print, then the conventions of spelling, just as the conventions of the meaning of words, matter. The more we flout the current conventions (and they are pretty fluid anyway), the less clearly we communicate.

Ustinov, of all people !

Carect Speeling