Over in merry old England, there's one academic who's turned into a sad panda-not literally, of course...that would make for a far more interesting story. Anyway, this toothy Brit's students are so bad at spelling that he's suggesting we all stop trying to spell difficult words, provided they make sense phonetically . Huh. Is this proposal revolutionary, or defeatist? We're leaning on the latter-but not because we're a bunch of crotchety old blowhards. On the contrary, we think that written language is expansive enough to include LOLZ and meticulously-edited, vibrant prose.