[ExI] Captchas

[Mike Dougherty]

2011/8/13 john clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net>
> But never mind all that, do you think the difference between "effect" and "affect" is VERY important or do you not? If the answer is yes then please explain why, if the answer is no then don't bother responding because your comments wouldn't be very important.

I know the above wasn't directed at me, but I'll answer anyway.  Yes;
important.  Yes; very important.  No; VERY important.  They're is no
need two shout about it but their is a distinction between too words.
If written language is secondary in importance to spoken language,
then all homophones should be normalized to phonetic spelling and we
would have to either live with the ambiguity resolved via context or
find some alternate way to pronounce the nuances between red and read.
 It is my understanding that Spain has a governing body for legalizing
the spelling of words to protect their pronunciation.  I assume this
comes from thousands of years of common speech among illiterate
proles.

I'm not sure how we could quantitatively measure the information
content of the Internet between written and non-written communication.
 I'm not sure if pr0n should qualify as communication for this purpose
but it also doesn't seem right to discount that volume of bandwidth
either.  Anyway, considering even the text-only communication of this
list we might assume the written word should take precedence over the
unique flapping of meat that is regional pronunciation of words.  In
that case, the difference between effect/affect should be treated as
significantly as feet/feat or less/lass  (both are one letter changes
e-to-a, I'll grant the significance of 1 letter out of 4 is
technically greater than 1 out of 6 but still mostly irrelevant to
this discussion)