The Importance of Spelling

December 18th 2007 - start of the 3rd Test Match England v Sri Lanka


So names yeah. Me and Alisha have problems about names. Like she’s really called Alicia right but she always puts Alisha cos that’s how it’s spoken yeah, teachers and people always said Alissya which pisses her off. And I was Chantelle till there was this totally stupid girl on Big Brother yeah who was a celeb for five minutes called Chantelle, so I changed myself to Chanelle and then fuckin’ell there was another dumb girl on BB and she was Chanelle so I can’t decide now. Actually my real name isn’t either of those but I’m not telling you.

So I like sympathise with the amazing Sri Lankan bowler Muttiah Muralitharan yeah, when he says like the spelling of his name that we all use in English isn’t quite correct right but it’s a bit late now cos he’s like the world’s leading wicket-taking spin bowler yeah and he’s in all the record books with a th and now it seems he would have rather had a d.

So I looked up the spelling (what did you older people do before there was Wikipedia, just not know stuff?) and I found in Tamil they have this letter. It looks like this yeah and sounds like ‘either th or dh’:

த்

Pretty, isn’t it? Is it just me or does that look a bit like a cricket ball above part of the stumps yeah and a wiggly line showing the ball went all over the place and fooled everyone? Dead appropriate lol.

But also actually if you know Asian people yeah quite a lot of them say d’s and th’s in quite a same sort of way so it is obviously like an intercultural language type thing, and people sometimes put dh in English to spell that sound yeah.

So perhaps to be really really right he should be Muralidharan yeah but he’s probably doomed to have a th forever now. Don’t expect he minds too much though yeah, after all we’re just foreigners putting it in our own funny writing as far as he’s concerned lol. As long as he keeps taking the wickets of our batsmen yeah he’ll be happy which he does with like supreme ease :(

The Sri Lankans are sooo cool yeah, I kind of sort of love Lasith Malinga with his crazy hair and his great smile yeah but don’t tell Karl right, I had to stop talking about Thierry Henry cos he got like edgy. Kumar Sangakkara is playing just amazing stuff yeah like every schoolboy cricket fan dreams of playing right and Mahela Jayawardene is like the Cool Captain In Charge and both those two are pretty neat like hotness-wise.

In our team I am also of course always fond of Alistair Cook who is tall dark handsome and from Essex what could be better. But it is difficult to keep being fond of Alistair at the moment yeah because he is not playing at like his sparkling best and has been out for some not exactly star quality scores right. OK he did well last innings but like even nice brown eyes don’t make up for an average of 36.75.

As you can see I’ve come a long way with my cricket knowledge yeah me and www.cricinfo.com are old friends now and I still get emails sometimes from the cute Aussie boy I met in the W Indies and he always like tests me on my cricket cos Aussies like even compete with their email friends it’s in their blood lol. But I do like cricket now yeah even though Alisha thinks I have severe psychological problems and could use some immediate help.

Sadly the Sri Lankans are pretty much playing better than us all round right and they just got beaten by the Aussies before. So even though we are supposed to be second in the world blimey could have fooled me yeah that must make the Aussies top of the world (no change there yawn) and the Sri Lankans second and us well like yeah somewhere else.

It is one of those mysterious Brit sport things right. Cos hey, the idea of cricket is to make more runs than the other side yeah and our batsmen just don’t make a lot of runs so like someone is missing the point. As I said to Karl right when he was really upset about us going out of Euro 2008, I was like, well did nobody explain to them that the best way to do it was to like score more goals than the opposition? Duh.

As for poor Freddie Flintoff yeah even though when we met him in the W Indies back in the day right he was hammered and drivelling on about his kids all the time he was a nice bloke really yeah and I am so sorry about his ankle. I had a problem like that after I fell over in some stunning Manolo-type shoes right and my ankle went, I can’t wear any heels higher than three inches now yeah which is a total pain and totally cramps my style :(

So am I still with Karl you ask well yeah he ain’t Thierry lol but he is very sweet and like reliable. The other useful thing about Karl is he is the anorak of all time and loves to blog yeah, so if you want to have a serious conversation about topical matters of importance like the new Prada handbag right you can just tell him there’s a big row about the Premier League on a Guardian blog yeah and he’ll grab the Apple Powerbook and be quiet for hours :))

Sports blogs are a great service to the women of the world yeah, cos if men disappear off down the pub yeah they never come back till later and are well pissed and boring while if they’re sitting at the laptop they are still to hand and you can call them away from the screen any time if you shout loud enough lol.