Hello Geoffrey, This raises several really good discussion points. Recently, I read the article by Tony Self, 'What if your readers can't read?' [I have corrected his heading into English from the original MS version of German] in Issue 16 of the Southern communicator. Tony seems to be advocating that we move en masse to sucking up to our children by providing online material in a form that bears a possibly faintly phonetic resemblance to some elements of English. And if we don't, he avers that we'll follow the dinosaur and the dodo. Tony can be very witty, and so it is possible his article was a bit tongue in cheek. His argument appears similar to one put forward by Pam Peters at a recent ASTC conference, where she seemed to be advocating that the spellings and meanings of words were whatever the mass of people said they were, no matter how that mass was defined or selected. When I accused Pam of being merely nosological, she countered very seriously that she was being phenomenological. When I was a lecturer at one university in the UK, we were inundated by overseas fee-paying students for whom English was their 347th language - this was in the Reagan / Thatcher years of rampant economic rationality - and of course the time of being economical with the truth - another Thatcher government specialism. I was faced with the uncomfortable dilemma of giving these foreign students what they wanted - high marks [sometimes in exchange for accepting offers of untraceable gold to oil the process] - or grading the work based on the standards that had been established over the previous 20 or more years. What Australians need to realise is that a university in the UK cannot just choose what standards it wishes to push - there is an elaborate cross-university grading of student work before final marks are announced; this is quite different from Australia where any university can offer what ever it likes by way of standards, much like the American model. When I started to follow the cross-university standards path, I got hauled up before the beak and was told in no uncertain terms that I was killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. My response, from an engineering perspective, was that if we opened the window wider all manner of parasites [I used a shorter word] flew in - in engineering speak, if you increase the bandwidth, you get more noise. So, on the one hand, I am aware of the marketing mantra - 'give the customers exactly what they seek'. But, as an engineer, I am aware that there are certain immutable basics that you ignore at your peril; eg, some of the laws of physics cannot be broken. So, do we take the immediacy of the statistical mean, or do we take the long term view of plus and minus three standard deviations, and the richness that is English? Brian.