Do you wear a T-shirt sometimes? How about jeans? Tracksuit pants? Slip-on shoes? A hat that doesn’t fasten under your chin? How lazy!
Those lazy clothes, and many more besides are the curse of civilization. We are losing so many clothes that take effort to wear. I’m calling for a return to corsets, collared shirts, dresses with bustles, lace-up boots, top hats, tails, ties and ballgowns before we descend into savagery!
Unhinged isn’t it? Yet this is exactly the kind of logic used by those who lament “lazy” speech.
There’s a thing called register. It’s the sliding scale of formality we use in human communication. Most of the time, with people we know and like, we speak informally. That’s not laziness; it’s efficiency, connection, identity.
Calling for rigid, formal pronunciation at all times is like demanding we all wear evening gowns to the supermarket. Speech is flexible because it needs to be — it changes with context, emotion, and geography. Variation is not the enemy; it’s the mark of a living language.
Of course, when teaching, adopting a clearer, slightly more formal register can help students hear words more distinctly. But that’s about clarity, not correction. Students still need to write what they say, not what you say. We teach writing and spelling to preserve meaning, not to obliterate accents or dialects.
Worse still is the idea that good reading and spelling can only grow from “proper” speech. Reading and spelling are not just frozen speech. They are distinct systems. Speaking is biologically wired. Spelling is invented. Speaking is fluid. Spelling is stable.
If spelling tried to chase speech, we’d drown in endless variations. Every accent, every local quirk would demand its own spelling system. Communication would collapse. Instead, spelling builds bridges over the shifting sands of speech. It relies on patterns, principles, and historical conventions — not on someone’s opinion of “correct” English.
Teaching spelling by policing pronunciation is not just misguided — it’s a category mistake. It’s like trying to fix sloppy jeans by forcing everyone into top hats. Wrong tool, wrong target.
Good spelling instruction is systematic. It respects the difference between how humans speak and how they write. It doesn’t dream of a golden age of corsets and crinolines, and it doesn’t waste time berating the living, breathing reality of spoken language.
So the next time you hear someone moaning about “lazy speech” ruining spelling, ask them if they wore a ballgown to breakfast. If not, they might want to rethink their argument.