The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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8:25am on Wednesday, 17th January, 2007:
Outburst
Some of these old laws that have been on the statute book for hundreds of years really ought to be repealed. Yesterday, one such piece of ancient legislation prevented me from threatening my first-year students with physical violence for the inability of over half of them to spell the word "lose". Given that I teach on a games course, and "lose" is one of those special technical terms we academics use to refer to the opposite of "win", I don't think it's unreasonable to be able to deliver blows from a cricket bat to the person of anyone spelling it "loose". But no, we have to adhere to these arbitrary decrees that are throwbacks to the Middle Ages, when spelling wasn't even an issue because most of the population couldn't read.
Surely there's some kind of exception clause that would at least allow me to place in the stocks students who say "a dice" instead of "a die"?
Referenced by Copyright Peculiarity.
Referenced by Loose Talk.
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Copyright © 2007 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).