My spelling (and grammar) are awful. (I just happened to notice 2 mistakes and then decided to put the rest into spell chk, I actually had to use google to find the difference between download and down load). I always take comfort in the following:
“I cannot write in English, because of the treacherous spelling. When I am reading, I only hear it and am unable to remember what the written word looks like.”
—Albert Einstein --- To Max Born, September 7,1944. AEA 8-207
“It is a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word.”
― Andrew Jackson
"I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way."
― Mark Twain
“Plagiarism is illegal, mispeeling iz knot.”
― Toni (U.A.C.)
“A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.”
― Baltasar Gracián
“If you can spell "Nietzsche" without Google, you deserve a cookie.”
― Lauren Leto
Mark Twain on Spelling:
I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing. I have a correspondent whose letters are always a refreshment to me, there is such a breezy unfettered originality about his orthography. He always spells Kow with a large K. Now that is just as good as to spell it with a small one. It is better. It gives the imagination a broader field, a wider scope. It suggests to the mind a grand, vague, impressive new kind of a cow.
- speech at a spelling match, Hartford, Connecticut, May 12, 1875. Reported in the Hartford Courant, May 13, 1875
Why, there isn't a man who doesn't have to throw out about fifteen hundred words a day when he writes his letters because he can't spell them! It's like trying to do a St. Vitus dance with wooden legs.
- The Alphabet and Simplified Spelling speech, December 9, 1907
I never had any large respect for good spelling. That is my feeling yet. Before the spelling-book came with its arbitrary forms, men unconsciously revealed shades of their characters and also added enlightening shades of expression to what they wrote by their spelling, and so it is possible that the spelling-book has been a doubtful benevolence to us.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography