“Why, for centuries, have people struggled to spell? Because English spelling is horribly hard. It is not just that we have ‘for’ and ‘four,’ ‘stake,’ ‘steak,’ and ‘mistake.’ We also have ‘peak,’ ‘peek,’ and ‘pique.’ ‘Horrid’ has a double consonant in the middle, ‘timid’ a single one. ‘Prefer’ has one ‘f,’ ‘proffer’ two.”