Does spelling matter? I think so. I imagine you do. And surely a body called the Spelling Society, above all, must think so too? Well, maybe not.

The British-based society would be better called the Spelling Reform Society. It dislikes the chaos of English, lamenting that the same -ee- sound can be spelled (or spelt?) in a dozen ways: as in (my example) leaving the scene, we three people retrieved the key of the machine by deceit from the debris, to water-ski by the quay.

The society has been arguing for a more phonetic system (shouldn’t it call itself the Speling Sosaiuti?) since 1908. But recently its president, one John Wells, an emeritus professor of phonetics, went a big step further.

One reason, he argued, “that English-speaking countries have problems with literacy is because of our spelling and the burden it places on children.” Unlike, say, kids in Finland, where spelling, it seems, is strictly phonetic. So, and here’s the shock, why bother if people use unorthodox spellings? Let them.

The professor emeritus mei uv bin shokd by the derision poured on him by traditionalists. I’m happy to add to it, and not solely to uphold tradition.

The weirdest thing in the hornets’ nest he aroused was a newspaper reprint of a literacy test for 16-year-old pupils at Harrow School. It asked them to pick the correct spelling in groups of words such as professor, proffessor and proffesor, or priviledge, privilege and privelige. Ought one to write loose the pen or lose it? Should one be loath to interfere or loathe? And would they please add apostrophes to Im sure I said its a four oclock start?

I could have handled that test at the age of eleven. Educated in a state school, so could my wife. And for this, today, Daddy pays one of England’s grandest “public schools” £28,000 a year, almost Rs 24 crore! No wonder British employers complain that would-be recruits, even graduates, let alone teenagers fresh from dump schools, cannot spell.

Does it matter? After all, English spelling was far from uniform five centuries ago, and we today can all cope with the familiar differences between America and Britain (or India): labor for labour, traveler for traveller, and so on. Should we maybe go phonetic? That would cut English off from its past, but would indeed help children learn to read.

Some folk wouldn’t mind. At the once-literate BBC, television subtitles have long read gonna, even when the speaker clearly said going to; and they’ve recently taken to you should of done this or that.

Yet even phonetically spelt languages aren’t fully so: they have to ignore regional differences of pronunciation. So would English: think to Cockneys is fink (I once saw a notice-board advertising Free Georgian houses) and in much of Ireland it’s close to tink. And English, like Spanish, has whole countries to worry about, not just regions. It has a still worse problem too: many English vowel sounds — eg, the one I’ve (mis)used a u for in Sosaiuti and uv — cannot in fact really be represented by the current alphabet.

Professor or prufesu Wells’s idea sidesteps all this: it would leave every child free to suit itself. Taken to extremes (which, to be fair, he doesn’t propose, but others would), the result would not even be the ugly yet useful straitjacket of near-phoneticism, but chaos.

Well, why not? Because — forget the past, and the Greco-Latin reasons we write school not skool — this would make it harder, not easier, for children, and in time adults, to read anyone’s words but their own. It would render dictionaries almost impracticable, even electronic ones. And, which is neither traditional nor trivial, it would reduce such miracles of information as Google to a trackless quagmire.

Some IT genius might develop answers to this. But is it chance that even the text-messaging which it is now trendy to admire has spelling rules of its own?