Hey, how many I's are there in "idiocy"?

This week in Washington D.C., throngs of brainy preadolescents are gathered to spell each other into submission. When the vowels clear, one of them will be crowned the champion of the National Spelling Bee.

An admirable thrill-a-minute event that any red-blooded American would applaud, right?

Not quite, apparently. A group calling itself the Simplified Spelling Society has descended on the terrified linguiphiles--pretty sure I just made that word up, by the way--in protest of how difficult English-language spellings are.

Read more about it here.

Their beef is that the language includes too many "rules" that really are just a big jumble of exceptions. No argument here. But they continue on to say that because learning to spell is so difficult, the U.S. experiences more illiteracy than it should, and thus more crime than it should, meaning that if we just took the "ough" out of "coff," you'd never have to worry about being mugged!

Although I think this idea has about as much merit as a Space Shuttle made out of lint and Scotch tape, maybe we should give this a shot. The entertainment value of trying to spell something like "ophthalmosauridae" phonetically is, as far as I'm concerned, off the charts.

Alternatively, it's possible this is all a big joke and I'm just guh-la-bull.