Two Things That Have Led People to Spell Wrong

First, people sometimes spell plurals with an apostrophe. The only plurals that are correctly spelled with apostrophes are some plurals of letters. Examples: mind your p's and q's, PhD's (although this one can be spelled without the apostrophe, I think).

I believe that the reason people might be confused about this is just one word: Levi's. People take that to be a plural but it is actually a possessive.

Second: Since we have--evidently acceptable--spellings such as Grammys, Emmys, etc. People forget the old rule for spelling words ending in y which I was taught in school: Change y to i and add -es. Thus pastries, not, as we see sometimes, pastrys (etc.).

 

 

The Chaos of English Spelling (More Examples)

The sound /oo/ (I dearly wish I could use a phonetic or phonemic alphabet) can be spelled, in English, in an almost incredible number of ways:

Blue, blew, shoe, lose, cool, fuse, through. Oo is common: loose, booze, choose, moose, goose, noose. Also uCe (where C stands for consonant): accuse, abuse, infuse, allude, intrude, etc.

There is actually some regularity in English spelling--despite all you hear to contrary, here and elsewhere. That was the thread, the principle, in the Spelling textbooks on which I worked in one of my first jobs.

What chaos there is can partly be blamed on Norman scribes who, after the Norman conquest, put some effort into fixing or straightening out English spelling--and only made things worse with their band-aid approach and their frequent failure to properly understand that which they were tampering with.

(Some of) The Irregularities of English Spelling

 

It has often been said that English spelling is chaotic and difficult for non-native (and even native) speakers to learn. It is true that you can look and quite a few sounds and see that they can be spelled in various ways--with little if any way to predict, from the aural sound, what the spelling should be. Here is an example, for the vowel sound in the word ear, represented by the phonetic symbol \ɚ\.

One common spelling of \iɚ\	Another, approximately as common	Rarer spelling of this sound
fear	beer	weir
tear	cheer	mere
clear	leer
hear	deer
near	peer
rear	steer
year	veer
sear
smear

There have been many calls for the reform of English spelling. There are as many reasons why no significant spelling reform has taken place. (The probably only notable exception is the reforms of Noah Webster--those which have made American spelling different from English spelling; e.g. color rather than colour, center rather than centre.)

I have often thought that there are small, isolated areas that could be made more regularized; but then I realize that a piecemeal effort at spelling reform is a bad idea.