Why spelling matters!

In the face of all these people who claim it doesn't really matter whether or not you can spell, I thought it might be nice to have somewhere we can post items that prove, once and for all, that it does. Here's the first one:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-24705723

Looks like it had a happy ending. And I take the lady's point about the names being sometimes spelt differently in UK and the target country. She should have been alerted by the spelling on boarding cards and departure boards but I wonder if the original mistake was down to mishearing (on telephone perhaps) by the company that made the arrangements. Once when I was in Kuwait booking a ticket to London and on to Inverness in Scotland I realised just in time I was about to be booked on a flight to Venice.

Someone was telling this story over lunch the other day, and a colleague commented that it does make you wonder where Reagan thought he was sending his troops in 1983...

The world is full of this kind of pitfall, and spelling doesn't always help: every time I want to fly to Manchester, KLM offers me the choice between two airports of the same name(*) on opposite sides of the Atlantic. I haven't clicked on the wrong one yet, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time before I do. And it will probably be on an occasion when I'm distracted by other things and fail to spot that the flight time looks unusually long.

(*) They should rename one "Friedrich Engels" and the other "Josiah Bartlett", then it would be easy to remember which is which.

Try flying home from Italy via Munich. Similar problem there.

And speaking of Venice: I heard of a Japanese couple who flew to Copenhagen, and wanted a train for Venice (I really don't know why they thought this route was a good idea). Only problem was, they ended up in the not too differently pronounced Vännäs.

>4 andejons:
I'm sure there must be an apocryphal story somewhere about an American in Norway who told the taxi driver to go to Hell.

People hear what they are expecting to hear, on the whole, and foreign accents don't help. A French friend who was staying with me a couple of years ago wanted to go to see a friend of a friend who lived in the Appelstraat. However, when she got there, no-one had ever heard of the person: it turned out that when asking the bus driver for directions she had given the name of the city in French ("La Haye"), and he had understood it as "Leiden", a completely different city, 20km away from where she wanted to be, but with an "L" and a vaguely similar diphthong in it. And a perfectly good Appelstraat, apparently.

You don't have to go to Norway. I've been to Hell, Michigan.

I have a work book about this subject. It is titled: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear

No, I didn't want a 12 inch pianist.

>5 thorold:
One of the delights of Hell in Norway is that its actually quite close to Paradis!

I read a magazine article recently where the writer tried to use the word 'cuddle' (from context), but perhaps typed coddle in error, and it was ultimately edited as caudal.

>10 2wonderY:
An unlikely tail.