Yep. It’s a bit hard to fathom today, but in the Middle Ages few people had the ability to read and write, mostly either learned monks and clergy, or those wealthy enough to be taught by them. With such a small pool of people, it’s comparatively easy to influence the prevailing spelling through the actions of a few.
inefficient_electron
joined 1 year ago
Debt used to be spelled dette or simply det. We spell it with a useless silent “b” today because meddlers decided to bring it back to its Latin roots of debitum. This happened in French as well, even though neither language ever pronounced the “b” and had no business adding it. The same happened with words like doubt, plumber, subtle, indict, and island. French was sensible enough to reverse this through modern spelling reform, but I think English is stuck with it for the foreseeable future.
He posted about it on mastodon 7 days ago, so I don’t think it’s an old tweet. Maybe his personal website is just out of date? https://social.coop/@scottjenson/112468182058087636
We have options, just not good ones. After Starlink, the next best option where I live is 4G internet, which is way slower. Another satellite service or dialup are other options, both much worse than Starlink. We do not live in a remote location, just barely rural, and only a few kms from a town with gigabit fibre. Starlink is a fantastic service that has only gone down twice for us in the 7 months we’ve had it, and even then only briefly. I don’t think I can fully impress upon you just how much better it has made things.
Key words being “current supply”. There are major moves being made to change this. Supply and demand need to grow at the same time if this is to work though.