There’s nothing better on a warm summer evening than to spend a few hours reading a Christmas story out loud. Yes, today I recorded an audio book to be released at the end of the year; A Christmas Tree by Charles Dickens. Once again this will be made available as a free download with the option to pay if you want to. I’m considering the possibility of recording another one to release with A Christmas Tree as a ‘double a-side’ to be sold as a paid for download while keeping A Christmas Tree on its own as a freebie. Reading the story out loud isn’t as easy as you’d imagine it would be, and virtually impossible to do in one go. I found it easier to record a paragraph at a time (Dickens liked his paragraphs a little on the lengthy side) in order to give myself a rest.

Something I noticed about the original texts is the spelling, because Dickens was writing before the publication of the first dictionary so it hadn’t yet been decided how a word should look. Simple things like the word ‘ther’ being used instead of ‘there’ or ‘their’, something that people still seem to struggle with today, along with ‘your’ and ‘you’re’.

Is there a case for doing away with this convention in the present day? You only have to look at Twitter or Facebook updates to see how the simple lessons of spelling and grammar have passed so many people by. I for one get very angry when I see these little mistakes made, especially by intelligent people. Idiots have an excuse for poor spelling, that excuse being that they are idiots, but clever people do it too, (that’s ‘too’ and not ‘to’ or ‘two’). People I went to school with do it, and I know for a fact that it was taught to us so did they simply forget it? Writing in a hurry would appear to be the main reason, so why can’t they slow down and read what they have written first instead of racing towards the send button like their (not ‘there’) life depended on it? My computer has a built in spellchecker, so even a status update on Facebook can be corrected before being sent out into the world. That tell-tale squiggly red line sometimes even follows me onto Twitter to warn me that something isn’t right.

If we free ourselves from the shackles of having to employ the correct version of a word, would (wood) it make a difference? Everyone has seen that passage that became a meme a while ago in which every word was jumbled up apart from the first and last letter yet is still readable. This is because we don’t read by looking at the whole word but by scanning. So if we’re not even paying full attention to the words on the page, does it matter if we write ‘where’ instead of ‘were’ or ‘were’ instead of ‘we’re’?

My answer is yes. It matters a lot because as a country I sometimes feel as though we are leaking IQ points out of our pores. Too much of our way of life is being dumbed down and this is turning us into idiots, or at least dragging the clever people down towards an idiot society. People think that fruit is bright and shiny because they only see it in the supermarket instead of its natural state where it hasn’t been pumped full of chemicals, or they don’t know what animal gives us what meat for the same reason. You can buy chopped carrots, grated cheese, oven chips and all kinds of lazy food these days and the reason is presumably because the stupid section of society shouldn’t be allowed sharp objects.

So yes, these seemingly basic rules of our great language are still as important today as they have ever been. Next time you see an error in a friend’s Facebook status, point it out to the offender so that they will learn from it. You will be doing them a favour in the long run and they will hopefully thank you for it.

If you see someone writing ‘should of’ instead of ‘should have’ the above doesn’t apply. In this case you are allowed to simply punch them on the nose.

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