Vocabulary Is A Matter Of

The Story Of English Spelling Is The Story Of Thousands Of People - Some Well-known, Most Totally Unknown - Who Left A Permanent Linguistic Fingerprint On Our Orthography.

English Has Been This Vacuum Cleaner Of A Language, Because Of Its History Meeting Up With The Romans And Then The Danes, The Vikings And Then The French And Then The Renaissance With All The Latin And Greek And Hebrew In The Background.

As I Get Older And I Get A Few More Years Experience I Become More Like Dad, You Know, King Lear.

Spellings Are Made By People. Dictionaries - Eventually - Reflect Popular Choices.

Word Books Traditionally Focus On Unusual And Quirky Items. They Tend To Ignore The Words That Provide The Skeleton Of The Language, Without Which It Would Fall Apart, Such As 'and' And 'what,' Or Words That Provide Structure To Our Conversation, Such As 'hello.