Remember kids, you cannot understand the system from looking at single words. You must look at words in their families in order to understand the system, every single time. Always. Without fail.
Here's why Melvyn Ramsden's "Real Spelling" argument is just plain wrong:
A couple of years ago, I had to disabuse the ginormous Facebook SWI groups of their belief that that -s in besides and perhaps was marking a plural in words like besides, towards, afterwards, or perhaps after no one bothered to stop and figure out that there is no such thing as one *perhap.
I'm not calling this out because I love to be the smartest, or because I think it makes me morally superior. It certainly isn't making me richer.
Middle English is a bit of an orthographic free-for-all, but by the Early Modern Period, say about 1550 or 1600, the present-day spellings of these words had taken root.
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