Double Standards Watch

Several newspapers, including the Observer, have published reports of a sensational discovery by Bernard Lamb, Reader in Genetics at Imperial College London. He has found out that British students are not very good at spelling and even make more mistakes than students from Singapore and Brunei, for whom English is a second language.

Some of the errors include 'sun' instead of 'son', 'sewn' instead of 'sown' and 'rouge' instead of 'rogue'.

Shocking, isn’t it? Especially the last one.

On my desk in front of me at this moment is Phonetics and Phonology: A Practical Course by Peter Roach, Reader in Phonetics at Reading University, published by Cambridge University Press. And guess what. It spells 'rouge' as 'rogue' (page 223).

Shocking isn’t it?

Incidentally, it would be unwise to assume nowadays that students from Singapore are not native speakers of English.