Wothca Langauge

Kenny Who?, an obscure criminology lecturer from a university you’ve never heard of, unless you live next door to it, is struggling to cope with his new-found status of Most Popular Man in England, after suggesting that spelling mistakes should be accepted as legitimate variant spellings.

Semi-literate hordes swarmed into Quick Bucks University and carried the mild-mannered lecturer shoulder-high to Downing Street, demanding that he be made Prime Minister immediately.

“I’m not thick or anything, gosh crikey, no,” said one media studies postgraduate. “In fact, I reckon I’ve probably got some kind of dyslexia, yeah? But one that’s really hard to diagnose. And just think of all those poor foreigners - some of them are struggling with English as a second, third or even fourth language.”

“Who do them language fascists think they are, trying to force their Nazi rules onto people with their so-called dictionaries?” screamed a junior doctor. “If I wants to spell ‘trousers’ with a W, why the hell shouldn’t I? It’s a free country innit!”

“Language is all about like expression, yeah?” smiled a senior outplacement advisor. “How can you say what it is to be like you, right, when you’re struggling to remember whether it’s the third person singular or plural of a verb what takes an ‘s’? English is the stupidest, complicatedest, most hardest language ever. I reckon they ought to make this bloke king or something.”

A passing public schoolmaster, however, spoke up in defence of the English language.

“English has the simplest of verb structures, the most rudimentary participles, and its nouns are non-gender specific,” he said. “Really, anyone who thinks it’s a difficult language should try Latin.”

He was immediately seized by the baying crowd and strung up from the gates of Downing Street, next to an Icelander who had said much the same about his native tongue.

Police appealed for the crowd to disperse - and eventually succeeded when they announced that a spelling test would be held in five minutes, which might include words like ‘gauge’, ‘chieftain’ and ‘surprisingly’. Everyone in the crowd went ‘duh?’ and shuffled away with their knuckles dragging along the ground.