There's a Robert Browning story: A girl comes up to Browning with a copy of one his books, and in it there's a passage underlined and she says: "Mr. Browning, Mr. Browning, what does this mean?" Browning takes the book and he reads the passage and he stares off into space for a time and then he turns to the girl and flashes a big, beautiful Robert Browning smile, "Miss, sweet miss, when that passage was written God and Robert Browning knew what it meant. Now God knows."
Over the years I have had the (often joyful - to the extent I can feel joy) responsibility of helping New Americans hone their steppenfetchit routine. This has entailed discussing issues of "proper" usage and spelling when sailing on the strange, roiling sea of my native tongue. English is weird. Weird. Weered. I before E except after C except when it's Weird. I have told this story to them:
Once upon a time spelling wasn't much of an issue in English. Writing was a rare enough accomplishment in itself. Shakespeare's name was written two or three different ways. By him, as I have heard it. He used different spellings of his own name. When you try to chase Chris Marlowe through the documents of his time, I have heard you have like nineteen different spellings to contend with. I have seen reproduced a letter by Bonnie Prince Charlie - the 1745 one (admittedly that Charlie a bit of a doofus - why would the Windsors saddle a poor child with an unlucky name like 'Charles'?) - and in this letter the same word is spelt three different ways. When the great Mr. Johnson (the Saint of the English Language) built his Dictionary, he wasn't much concerned with spelling - he just swept up the words as he happened to find them. Mr. Johnson took a snapshot of each word and somehow 'proper' spelling came to mean that a word look like it did in Mr. Johnson's picture. Webster tried, in his 'American Dictionary', to unsnarl what was already becoming a tangled mess, but he didn't get very far. Various persons, George Bernard Shaw, and that guy who ran the Chicago Tribune (I think I mean him), have pointed at the Spelling Problem, but since we have progressed into Permanent War, the Spelling Problem has been mostly just ignored.
Mance Lipscomb used to pronounce 'chord' 'code' as in: "that song starts on a C code". But then he goes on to speak of keys in terms of codes. In 'mis-pronouncing' he changes meaning. I love that.
The English we have now ain't giving me Peace. I'll happily kiss Spelling and Grammar bye bye if it'll get me some Peace.
Koo walks into a place where there's a little orchestra. The professor on the piano says: "this thing starts on the chord, E minor. Do you know the chord, E minor?" Koo says, "I ain't got time for codes, perfesser. You play. And I'll play.
12:36:28 PM 
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