“Never make predictions,” Casey Stengel warned, “especially about the future.” But we can’t help ourselves. Now linguistics professor David Crystal (was his last name a self-fulfilling prophecy?) is telling audiences like the one at the Hay Literary Festival that Google will be changing our spelling habits. This development, he predicts, will be all to the good for the English language—not because we will start spelling with as iwth, but because we will drop all those irritating, unnecessary silent letters cluttering our orthography.
Maybe, maybe not. I’m no prognosticator. What interested me about Professor Crystal’s forecast was not so much the observation that commonly misspelled words receive an autocorrect from Google’s search engine, but rather his first example of a spelling ripe for change: rhubarb. My partner is Canadian, and as we were on a long drive, I me…