Proper spelling - is it that important?

Originally Posted by Iago

It's understandable if it's something French like WHORE DUHRVS that almost never gets written outside of the industry, but more often I see mistakes in very simple things like hamburger (hambirgur), lettuce (letis), bacon (bakin).

Wow. I can understand some spelling mistakes like the word "separate" becoming "seperate," but spelling like that looks too tacky to take seriously let alone read. It reminds me of a talk one of my high school teachers had about the English language.

How would you pronounce this word: ghoti?

With the right conventions, it would actually be pronounced "fish". The "gh" would form the noise similar to the "gh" in "rough", the "o" would come from the "o" in "women", and the "ti" would come from the "ti" in "station". Here's an exciting Wikipedia link!

Of course, that's a very extreme example, but as long as the reader can easily get the gist of what's being said, a few simple misspellings (or mispellings even though my spell check says otherwise) shouldn't hurt.

Jam it back in, in the dark.