Another year, another Times Spelling Bee. Are you feeling confidant? Are you definately sure you can emerge triumphent from a liasion with your competators? Even a miniscule error, after all, could be very embarrasing.

If you spotted that lot you may be in with a chance. Last year’s Times Spelling Bee, the first, was won by a team from St Martin’s School, northwest London. That was an “excruciating” final filled with “euphoria”, although “indefatigable” was a prominent characteristic, too.

When it comes to spelling, The Times parts company with Mark Twain, who wrote: “I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.” George Bernard Shaw, Twain’s contemporary, evangelised for the reform of spelling as strongly as he did for vegetarianism.

Yet the English language, unlike artificial creations such as Esperanto, is not the product of a single (if tidy) mind. It is a culture in which conventions are built up over many generations. To spell in English is to navigate a maze of Latin, Greek, Norman French, Celtic and Saxon. In a world where English is (confusingly) the lingua franca, it is our domestic spelling that marks out our English from American English, Indian English, and the utilitarian spellings of the Globish-speaking peoples.

To complain of the idiosyncrasies (not idiosyncracies) of English English is more futile than to rage against the tides. Language allows communication and is the vehicle of the imagination. If there were not accepted spellings, then there would still need to be other linguistic certainties. In a world of flux, where little is constant (and nothing is “constent”), spelling holds true.