Why does ‘lisp’ have an ‘s’ in it?

I really don’t get why spelling is so important. As long as people understand what I’m going on about, does it really matter if I spell the occasional word wrong?

Some words have letters in them that just make no sense; words like knife and lamb have letters that you don’t even pronounce! Personally, I don’t think that makes any sense. If people decide that the ‘H’ at the beginning of my name doesn’t need to be pronounced I get very annoyed; the ‘H’ isn’t there for decoration, it is part of my name. Other words are just frustrating because they are impossible to pronounce. However, onomatopoeia words are certainly my favourite.

Onomatopoeia is where the word sounds like the thing it is describing and tends to be spelt as it’s said. Bang, baa and moo are amongst the easiest words to spell as they are exactly as they sound. I think ‘lisp’ is one of these words as not only is it spelt as it sounds but it perfectly demonstrates what it is when someone says “I have a lisp”! (However, that is assuming that the person saying that actually has a lisp...) The word onomatopoeia is nothing like this. Not only is it impossible to spell but it in no way describes what it is.

Long words like onomatopoeia are terrible. Why is dyslexia so hard to spell when the people who write it the most are the ones who have the most trouble with spellings? Additionally, I don’t have a fear of long words, just an inability to spell them, but imagine having to write down that you have hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia when the word itself scares you! Or maybe even if you were a dyslexic hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobic – that would be terrible!

Words with multiple spellings also confuse me and with Americanism taking over, spelling clashes are appearing more and more often. Yogurt and yoghurt is one of the multiple spelling words that I come across a lot. My view is, if this word can be spelt more than one way, why can’t other? I expect you’ve come across the internet chain mail thing that says that says that as lnog as the frist and lsat lteetrs are in the ccreort oerdr and all the rgiht lrettets are terhe, we can siltl read waht is witretn. Why can’t teachers accept this?! Surely this means there is no need for the “’i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’” rule and also means we don’t have to worry about anomalies like neighbour and weird.

I have previously been threatened with disembowelment, disembodiment, decapitation, dissection and all deadly words beginning with ‘d’ for spelling simile with an extra ‘i’ and multiple spelling mistakes is something that will result in punishment in Terrie’s challenge. However, I will just have to rely on spellcheck to get me through when writing these blogs and answering such questions as “why does ‘lisp’ have an ‘s’ in it?” that often appear in the random conversations I have with Terrie!

DFTBA

Note for Terrie: The section in the second to last paragraph is intentionally spelt wrong! Do not punish me! Please!