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English language pedantry hot take? As long as a reader can understand, spelling a word the way it is pronounced is more correct than spelling it the way a dictionary spells it. The word only ended up in the dictionary spelled some way in the first place because some people were already spelling it that way. But it doesn't mean their choice was correct then and forever. Let language evolve.
I like this one, yet I mildly disagree. In my opinion, being that English spelling is already a complete disaster, standardized orthography is important in order for the widest range of persons to maintain comprehension.
However, I do believe that correcting people's spoken English is ridiculous, especially if it's their mother tongue. Language evolves, not everyone is meant to sound like some asshole from Cambridge.
In my experience, my French relatives are even worse for this, correcting their young children to always say oui instead of ouias, or asking us to say fais attention ! (written form) instead of fais gaffe ! (Informal, how people talk in familiar settings) when in the presence of their child. Nah bro I'm not going to pretend to be bourgeois just so you can feel superior.
The whole english writing system should just be nuked and started over from a phonetic alphabet, and same for any language that has a written form that's stuck so far behind in history it barely has any connections left to how it is written. It's insane to constantly waste so much time, effort and resources because the language has naturally evolved so far from the version the writing system still clings to
In this case, how far do we go through? Do we basically eliminate the letter 'c'? Do we re-add thorn and eth? So many possibilities, but I doubt we will ever see it come to fruition in our lifetimes. There are too many people who are obsessed with tradition in the world.
Oh killing c would be a good start, since it's basically entirely replaceable with k and s. I wouldn't go as far as opposing all tradition though, since there's no reason to fiddle with traditional letter systems if they still fulfill their purpose well enough. Like sure, for example japanese could be a lot easier with eliminating kanji, but there's significant cultural background and meaning in those that's worth preserving - and everything can still be written phonetically when needed anyway.
English alphabet on the other hand does not have such meaningful tradition in it that couldn't be preserved with just at least tweaking the usage a bit to be more phonetic, as now it's already become basically half-way gibberish (fish vs. ghoti). I don't know french well enough to shame it as harshly, but it's writing system could definitely improve with a bit of nuking too
The saving grace with French is that when you read a word, you can (almost always) divine its pronunciation immediately. I'm not saying a reform isn't in order, as not pronouncing half the letters in a word seems kinda stupid, but in my opinion English is several orders of magnitude worse. My spouse, who practically learned English through me while we lived in an Anglophone country for almost a decade and is quite fluent, still can't spell worth a shit.
And even us native speakers have to guess the correct pronunciation of words we haven't heard before, which is insane. When l was young I was a voracious reader, but having never heard many of the more uncommon words spoken before, I often internalised the wrong way of saying them.
Fuck it, I'm on board. Let's gut this thing and start fresh.
Yeah, I can understand being illiterate in something with a very complex writing systems (like chinese), but english has no excuses. Every language that's standardized will have their own problems as fluidity of language and strict systems don't exactly work that well together, but what english has going on would be so simple to improve even with just slight changes!