"Windows 9x and above though do enforce rules on extensions"...Eh? No they don't; just as in DOS, you can make filenames with or without extensions. The habit of forcing default extensions onto filenames rests with applications, but is NOT a Windows function.
Of course filetype/extension mapping is handled by Windows, but Windows itself won't care if you remove all the filetypes and go completely extensionless.
I have plenty of both files and directories that do and don't have extensions, made both in DOS and Windows. Oh, I'm a WordPerfect-DOS user myself.:)
As to the Mac system of totally hiding the filetype, that's one of the reasons I always detested MacOS. The fact that Win9x and later want to do likewise is a large flaw, and is one of the first things I correct on any Windows box.
Actually, I can't think of a single domestic animal that *doesn't* sometimes have sex for pleasure (and the genetic implication is that most wild animals do likewise).
And "lesbian" relationships are fairly common. Females of most species will hump one another regularly, often without regard to whether they're in heat or not; some display a marked preference for it.
Strange Farm Facts: If you give a hen a feelie to check if she's laying or not, pretty quick she'll stop trying to peck you when you swipe her eggs, cuz hens LIKE that feelie. (And you thought YOU had something to regret admitting you know...:)
The "dumb jock" stereotype, in my observation, has very little basis in fact. Take a look at the "day jobs" of pro football players -- there are a good number of lawyers and engineers among 'em, frequently having graduated at the top of their class. You don't get that kind of academic honour without earning it, not even if the school gave you a bogus sports scholarship.
(And have you looked at a modern football playbook? You gotta be a rocket scientist to make sense of it.)
"I just wish some people here could respect a passion for something other than what the fastast processor is, I guess, is what I'm trying to say"
And if the geek set would pull their heads outta their ASM, they'd be a whole lot healthier, too -- both physically and mentally. It's NOT healthy to put your whole life into a single pursuit -- not even if it's your passion.
Folk tend to forget that until less than 200 years ago, nearly all vessels, including ocean-going freighters and commercial fishing craft, were powered primarily by wind. So the idea that it "can't be done" is just ignorance of history.
And with fuel costs going the way they are, ISTM a return to wind only makes sense. Perhaps primary propulsion by wind, with engines for backup, and solar panels for electricity on smaller craft that don't need fullscale generator power.
I suspect another (if lesser) issue was a decreasing supply of skilled sailors, as more and more young men found careers away from the docks and the sea. Plus as the big sailing vessels aged out, they were replaced by powered ships, so there was less opportunity to become a skilled sailor even if you were so inclined.
Much the same dynamic that applies every time a new technology comes along that does the same job in greater bulk for less cost, and requires less skill -- the old skills and systems then age out and are not replaced.
I noticed the Godwinists had come out of the woodwork:) But a lot of people can't distinguish "realworld observations" from "unfounded bias". And all the idealism in the world can't force all persons to have equal merits.
Yep, I think that "selection skew" idea is probably on the right track -- and it starts down in the trenches. People I know who work in corporate settings (especially marketing, where I-win-you-lose is often the mindset) regale me with plenty of tales of office bitch-fights. I think what happens is that the moment the average female (of any warmblooded species) feels threatened and like she might not "get hers", she reacts aggressively and with intent to "kill". Corporate culture being what it is, the most aggressive woman is more likely to get ahead (often by "killing" everyone who gets in her way).
Your contrary example of academic settings is probably a lot more like "organizing the village" or "running the extended family", and isn't so much about "I-win-you-lose". So I expect such an environment is less likely to trigger an aggressive/defensive response.
As to "more devious", that goes along with how in nature, the female has to get home to raise the young, or her line ends -- so selection pressure has been toward she who is the most effective sneak, especially when threatened.
So... put women in the pressure cooker, and in general the most devious bitches will rise to the top.
Moonlighting caught me with its cleverness in its first few episodes, but it didn't last. As to my small part [g] it was just extra work, but a good place to observe from... Bruce Willis was never there on a day I worked the show, but acto all those on the spot, he was an utter and total asshole too, if anything worse than his co-star.
Cybil dahling would throw a fit and refuse to work if anyone (including mere background extras and occasionally even crew!) was on the set who was blond, or wearing any of HER colours (blue, green, I forget what else, but everyone else were pretty much constrained to grey, beige, etc.) Wouldn't work if she felt snubbed. Etc, etc. Spoiled bitch.
On what the crew taught us to fondly call "Gagme and Rapeme", the two stars hated each other and promptly disappeared in opposite directions the moment the directed yelled CUT. They had to put a PA to tailing each one to keep track of where the hell she was. The blond one, whose name I forget, also did that "no other blonds on the set" crap, and if she was in a Mood you never knew til she snapped. OTOH if Tyne Daly was feeling bitchy, she'd announce it in so many words, so all were forewarned. One can at least respect an honest bitch.:)
Unlike Moonlighting, which was a dreadful show to work (as is typical with any show that's behind schedule and over budget), C&L was a very good show to work, so long as you stayed out of the Stars' way.
Exactly... in fact I was going to mention the entertainment industry, but forgot... Worst kind of show to be involved with is one with a female star. (Having worked on "Gagme and Rapeme", er, I mean "Cagney and Lacy" and also "Moonlighting"...lordy!)
I think it comes down to warmblooded-creature hardwiring, tho -- because you can observe the same sort of behaviour in everything from chickens on up. If there's a normal male in the social mix, he is ALWAYS in charge (even if it doesn't appear so), and his presence alone keeps the females in line, even when most of said females are "betas" (akin to "short man's complex"). But if there is no boss male present, beta females chronically fight and often kill one another.
"Alpha" (who know their place in life and have nothing to "prove") and "nobody" (not socially visible) females are not part of this pattern of aggression. The "good boss" human females doubtless are such alphas, but they are also not the biological norm. As a pro dog trainer, I assure you that the same issues exist in dogs -- you DON'T want to waste your time arguing with beta-females, if males or alpha-females are available!!
As to how this came about -- Nature doesn't care what a male does with himself after he reproduces -- if he then dies, oh well! So males are free to behave straightforwardly, and there's no hard selection against that. But the female has to make it home to raise her young, or her line ENDS. So selection pressure has been toward females that will do ANYTHING to survive. Hence when they get in a position of power, they tend to abuse it.
Over a hundred years ago, Hans Christian Anderson regaled us with it in "What the Old Man Does is Always Right", in which we start with a horse, descend to a bushel of rotten apples, and wind up feelthy rich.
That's been my observation too -- when women get into positions of power, they act like little tin gods -- much more uniformly so than do men. But look at even the lower levels, anywhere women are in competitive positions, such as sales/marketing; the level of backbiting and other sneak-biting behaviour makes what competitive men do pale by comparison.
I've also noted that as a rule, women in professional positions tend to be by-the-book, inflexible, and even if the customer knows WAY more than they do, you can't teach 'em anything.
There are exceptions, but such are my observations -- and mind you, I *used* to be all for total gender equality. But after a few more decades of experience, I decided we had it right the first time.
Carly, Hillary, Feinstein, and Boxer... those oughta be enough examples to scare the gender egalitarian out of anyone:)
The Official Word from M$, last I heard (and this was directly from M$'s own people, at one of their local seminars) was that when they go to check whether you're legit and fully licensed, neither the COA, nor the original CD, nor the retail box counts. ONLY the original purchase receipt counts.
That's what they said... The receipt is the ONLY evidence they'll accept. So it behooves purchasing departments to hold onto those original receipts -- forever.
And as to everyone else... time to start dumpster-diving!!
An AC says of my weigh vs way example, "In other words, English doesn't need a spelling reform but a pronounciation reform!"
That's actually the whole point. Most of what are *now* homonyms are spelled to match how they were pronounced in their respective root languages, but the distinctions have been lost as words migrated into other languages and got mauled by regional accents, vowel shifts, etc.
So yes, maybe what's really needed is a return to the pronuciation standards of Old and Middle English!!
Yes, but at 5 years old I'd not encountered those other words, whereas I *had* seen the book "Bartholomew Beaver" -- my kindergarten had it. The "standard" pattern of accents would make it
barth-o-LOM-ew
(akin to "kindergarten":) and that "sounded wrong", but I couldn't figure out how to "fix" it!
At age 5, I hadn't yet realised that proper names don't necessarily follow the usual rules for common words, nor had I encountered enough other exceptions to adjust my self-taught rules of phonics accordingly.
But such problems were so rare that... here it is 46 years later and I still remember it!
No fair using modern games to learn ancient concepts:)
Actually.. I know a guy who teaches D&D (for real money) to middle-school kids... and the kids wind up learning vocabulary, history, and statistical math whether they realise it or not. It's turned some formerly-poor students into go-getters who wind up near the top of their class.
[laughing] That's a GREAT set of examples of how spelling defines context. And sooth, I fain well ken the fane without feign, and now I feel REALLY old:)
Oh yeah, I hear that one... It doesn't bother me when a non-native speaker not formally trained in English creatively rearranges English grammar; that's to be expected, and no doubt we'd do the same to their native tongue.
But when someone who theoretically was raised on and trained in English as their native language doesn't grok the most basic verbal relationships (such as "should of" which is at root a mishearing that fails to connect with the right word)... well, that sort of thing is getting more and more common, and worse, over the past 10-15 years has become *acceptable* in mass media. Major-metro TV news anchors often clearly have no clue what the words they're reading off the teleprompter are; major newspapers' articles are frequently written in substandard or downright wrong English...
As to who's right, there are two obvious schools of thought: 1) this is correct by current educated practice, and therefore all degenerations are wrong; or 2) this degenerated usage has become the common speech, therefore is now correct by default.
The problem with letting a degeneration become "correct by default" is that it tends to lower educational expectations, and after a couple generations you have the situation you and I are bemoaning, where people who should know better -- don't.
And I think it's not so much that teachers have become tolerant, as that today's younger teachers grew up in the current degenerated system, and often don't know any better themselves.
Oral and written spelling don't necessarily use the same brain pathways. A *lot* of people spell visually, ie. can only really spell correctly when they write it down (SEE the word). In fact a spelling-bee trick for non-oral spellers is to close your eyes and visualize the word being typed out, rather than trying to spell it off the top of your head. So... it's not that you can't spell for shit (I wandered through some of your other posts to check:) but rather than you're a visual speller.
BTW your nym wouldn't refer to GtFalls HS, would it?
Oh, that -- no, I didn't have to stop and "work out pronunciation" on any of the words. Botching the meter tho, that happened a few times, when it didn't flow consistently. Admittedly it does pretty well for a poem that's forcibly constructed to fit a certain theme using certain words.
As to how the world has changed, I'm 51, so my perspective spans a few more decades than the average slashdotter:)
As to spelling bees, when I was in grade school it wasn't a nerd activity, it was something *everyone* participated in (I once got 2nd place for my whole grade school:) And generally kids failed a word not for not knowing how to spell it, but rather when they thought too much about it instead of just going with the flow of the language, so to speak (oral spelling is a lot like oral grammar; if you stop and think about it, you're liable to get it more wrong than if you just SAY it).
As to the perceived benefit of "consistent" spelling, someone up above laid out the perfect example of how that would by-design cause confusion and LOSS of context for homonyms -- search for "whey" (as contextually distinct from way and weigh) and you'll find the post.
Very funny sample! I can read it substantially without errors -- its choice of words doesn't bother me, but the rhythm is broken as it stands -- meter isn't consistent.
But English wasn't any tougher 30-40 years ago than it is today... yet kids of that era didn't, and as adults don't, have the problems that kids of our Modren Era do... which in itself points at education, or lack of it, as the culprit.
[beats self with a diagramming tool for typing such an ugly sentence];)
Ah. Personally I find German not so pleasing... but I love Latin, as an amazing logical language with a beauty inherent in its structure. (Tho by now I've forgotten most of my high-school Latin, and all but a few phrases of my Jr.High German, which at the time was still a *required* class.)
The TH part of THin and THey started life as two different letters with different sounds, the thorn and I forget the name of the other one; anyway, that's why in very old manuscripts, you sometimes see them printed differently.
Exactly. Parents no longer sit down and read to their preschool-age kids. My mom DID... and I could read at a 4th grade level by the time I was 5 years old -- AND I already had a sufficient grok of phonics (by intuition, not training) that I could work out ANY word, even one I'd never seen before. (The only ones that gave me trouble were irregulars like "Bartholomew" -- where the accents don't fall on the standard syllables.)
Between that, and when spelling/phonics began being taught (in my era, that was in the 2nd grade), it was very easy for me and for most students. Kids who couldn't read, and who couldn't puzzle out new words, were very rare.
But now? Spelling isn't taught until the 4th grade or even later. Phonics often isn't taught at all, another legacy of the "whole word recognition" debacle (if you watch severe dyslexics, you'll see that WWR is how they read -- so the object of WWR was apparently to make everyone read at the level of the lowest common denominator!) I remember when the first WWR experiments came along -- my 5th grade class was one of 'em, and even at that age we KNEW we were being shortchanged compared to the other kids.
As to "odd" spellings like weigh vs way, they DO convey meaning. Frex, a "weigh station" is not the same thing as a "way station".
Slashdot Mirror
"Windows 9x and above though do enforce rules on extensions" ...Eh? No they don't; just as in DOS, you can make filenames with or without extensions. The habit of forcing default extensions onto filenames rests with applications, but is NOT a Windows function.
:)
Of course filetype/extension mapping is handled by Windows, but Windows itself won't care if you remove all the filetypes and go completely extensionless.
I have plenty of both files and directories that do and don't have extensions, made both in DOS and Windows. Oh, I'm a WordPerfect-DOS user myself.
As to the Mac system of totally hiding the filetype, that's one of the reasons I always detested MacOS. The fact that Win9x and later want to do likewise is a large flaw, and is one of the first things I correct on any Windows box.
Actually, I can't think of a single domestic animal that *doesn't* sometimes have sex for pleasure (and the genetic implication is that most wild animals do likewise).
:)
And "lesbian" relationships are fairly common. Females of most species will hump one another regularly, often without regard to whether they're in heat or not; some display a marked preference for it.
Strange Farm Facts: If you give a hen a feelie to check if she's laying or not, pretty quick she'll stop trying to peck you when you swipe her eggs, cuz hens LIKE that feelie. (And you thought YOU had something to regret admitting you know...
The "dumb jock" stereotype, in my observation, has very little basis in fact. Take a look at the "day jobs" of pro football players -- there are a good number of lawyers and engineers among 'em, frequently having graduated at the top of their class. You don't get that kind of academic honour without earning it, not even if the school gave you a bogus sports scholarship.
(And have you looked at a modern football playbook? You gotta be a rocket scientist to make sense of it.)
"I just wish some people here could respect a passion for something other than what the fastast processor is, I guess, is what I'm trying to say"
And if the geek set would pull their heads outta their ASM, they'd be a whole lot healthier, too -- both physically and mentally. It's NOT healthy to put your whole life into a single pursuit -- not even if it's your passion.
Folk tend to forget that until less than 200 years ago, nearly all vessels, including ocean-going freighters and commercial fishing craft, were powered primarily by wind. So the idea that it "can't be done" is just ignorance of history.
And with fuel costs going the way they are, ISTM a return to wind only makes sense. Perhaps primary propulsion by wind, with engines for backup, and solar panels for electricity on smaller craft that don't need fullscale generator power.
I suspect another (if lesser) issue was a decreasing supply of skilled sailors, as more and more young men found careers away from the docks and the sea. Plus as the big sailing vessels aged out, they were replaced by powered ships, so there was less opportunity to become a skilled sailor even if you were so inclined.
Much the same dynamic that applies every time a new technology comes along that does the same job in greater bulk for less cost, and requires less skill -- the old skills and systems then age out and are not replaced.
I noticed the Godwinists had come out of the woodwork :) But a lot of people can't distinguish "realworld observations" from "unfounded bias". And all the idealism in the world can't force all persons to have equal merits.
Yep, I think that "selection skew" idea is probably on the right track -- and it starts down in the trenches. People I know who work in corporate settings (especially marketing, where I-win-you-lose is often the mindset) regale me with plenty of tales of office bitch-fights. I think what happens is that the moment the average female (of any warmblooded species) feels threatened and like she might not "get hers", she reacts aggressively and with intent to "kill". Corporate culture being what it is, the most aggressive woman is more likely to get ahead (often by "killing" everyone who gets in her way).
Your contrary example of academic settings is probably a lot more like "organizing the village" or "running the extended family", and isn't so much about "I-win-you-lose". So I expect such an environment is less likely to trigger an aggressive/defensive response.
As to "more devious", that goes along with how in nature, the female has to get home to raise the young, or her line ends -- so selection pressure has been toward she who is the most effective sneak, especially when threatened.
So... put women in the pressure cooker, and in general the most devious bitches will rise to the top.
Moonlighting caught me with its cleverness in its first few episodes, but it didn't last. As to my small part [g] it was just extra work, but a good place to observe from... Bruce Willis was never there on a day I worked the show, but acto all those on the spot, he was an utter and total asshole too, if anything worse than his co-star.
:)
Cybil dahling would throw a fit and refuse to work if anyone (including mere background extras and occasionally even crew!) was on the set who was blond, or wearing any of HER colours (blue, green, I forget what else, but everyone else were pretty much constrained to grey, beige, etc.) Wouldn't work if she felt snubbed. Etc, etc. Spoiled bitch.
On what the crew taught us to fondly call "Gagme and Rapeme", the two stars hated each other and promptly disappeared in opposite directions the moment the directed yelled CUT. They had to put a PA to tailing each one to keep track of where the hell she was. The blond one, whose name I forget, also did that "no other blonds on the set" crap, and if she was in a Mood you never knew til she snapped. OTOH if Tyne Daly was feeling bitchy, she'd announce it in so many words, so all were forewarned. One can at least respect an honest bitch.
Unlike Moonlighting, which was a dreadful show to work (as is typical with any show that's behind schedule and over budget), C&L was a very good show to work, so long as you stayed out of the Stars' way.
Exactly... in fact I was going to mention the entertainment industry, but forgot... Worst kind of show to be involved with is one with a female star. (Having worked on "Gagme and Rapeme", er, I mean "Cagney and Lacy" and also "Moonlighting" ...lordy!)
I think it comes down to warmblooded-creature hardwiring, tho -- because you can observe the same sort of behaviour in everything from chickens on up. If there's a normal male in the social mix, he is ALWAYS in charge (even if it doesn't appear so), and his presence alone keeps the females in line, even when most of said females are "betas" (akin to "short man's complex"). But if there is no boss male present, beta females chronically fight and often kill one another.
"Alpha" (who know their place in life and have nothing to "prove") and "nobody" (not socially visible) females are not part of this pattern of aggression. The "good boss" human females doubtless are such alphas, but they are also not the biological norm. As a pro dog trainer, I assure you that the same issues exist in dogs -- you DON'T want to waste your time arguing with beta-females, if males or alpha-females are available!!
As to how this came about -- Nature doesn't care what a male does with himself after he reproduces -- if he then dies, oh well! So males are free to behave straightforwardly, and there's no hard selection against that. But the female has to make it home to raise her young, or her line ENDS. So selection pressure has been toward females that will do ANYTHING to survive. Hence when they get in a position of power, they tend to abuse it.
Let that be a lesson to you trading n00bs!
That's been my observation too -- when women get into positions of power, they act like little tin gods -- much more uniformly so than do men. But look at even the lower levels, anywhere women are in competitive positions, such as sales/marketing; the level of backbiting and other sneak-biting behaviour makes what competitive men do pale by comparison.
:)
I've also noted that as a rule, women in professional positions tend to be by-the-book, inflexible, and even if the customer knows WAY more than they do, you can't teach 'em anything.
There are exceptions, but such are my observations -- and mind you, I *used* to be all for total gender equality. But after a few more decades of experience, I decided we had it right the first time.
Carly, Hillary, Feinstein, and Boxer... those oughta be enough examples to scare the gender egalitarian out of anyone
The Official Word from M$, last I heard (and this was directly from M$'s own people, at one of their local seminars) was that when they go to check whether you're legit and fully licensed, neither the COA, nor the original CD, nor the retail box counts. ONLY the original purchase receipt counts.
That's what they said... The receipt is the ONLY evidence they'll accept. So it behooves purchasing departments to hold onto those original receipts -- forever.
And as to everyone else... time to start dumpster-diving!!
An AC says of my weigh vs way example, "In other words, English doesn't need a spelling reform but a pronounciation reform!"
That's actually the whole point. Most of what are *now* homonyms are spelled to match how they were pronounced in their respective root languages, but the distinctions have been lost as words migrated into other languages and got mauled by regional accents, vowel shifts, etc.
So yes, maybe what's really needed is a return to the pronuciation standards of Old and Middle English!!
barth-o-LOM-ew
(akin to "kindergarten" :) and that "sounded wrong", but I couldn't figure out how to "fix" it!
At age 5, I hadn't yet realised that proper names don't necessarily follow the usual rules for common words, nor had I encountered enough other exceptions to adjust my self-taught rules of phonics accordingly.
But such problems were so rare that... here it is 46 years later and I still remember it!
No fair using modern games to learn ancient concepts :)
Actually.. I know a guy who teaches D&D (for real money) to middle-school kids... and the kids wind up learning vocabulary, history, and statistical math whether they realise it or not. It's turned some formerly-poor students into go-getters who wind up near the top of their class.
[laughing] That's a GREAT set of examples of how spelling defines context. And sooth, I fain well ken the fane without feign, and now I feel REALLY old :)
Oh yeah, I hear that one... It doesn't bother me when a non-native speaker not formally trained in English creatively rearranges English grammar; that's to be expected, and no doubt we'd do the same to their native tongue.
... well, that sort of thing is getting more and more common, and worse, over the past 10-15 years has become *acceptable* in mass media. Major-metro TV news anchors often clearly have no clue what the words they're reading off the teleprompter are; major newspapers' articles are frequently written in substandard or downright wrong English...
But when someone who theoretically was raised on and trained in English as their native language doesn't grok the most basic verbal relationships (such as "should of" which is at root a mishearing that fails to connect with the right word)
As to who's right, there are two obvious schools of thought: 1) this is correct by current educated practice, and therefore all degenerations are wrong; or 2) this degenerated usage has become the common speech, therefore is now correct by default.
The problem with letting a degeneration become "correct by default" is that it tends to lower educational expectations, and after a couple generations you have the situation you and I are bemoaning, where people who should know better -- don't.
And I think it's not so much that teachers have become tolerant, as that today's younger teachers grew up in the current degenerated system, and often don't know any better themselves.
Oral and written spelling don't necessarily use the same brain pathways. A *lot* of people spell visually, ie. can only really spell correctly when they write it down (SEE the word). In fact a spelling-bee trick for non-oral spellers is to close your eyes and visualize the word being typed out, rather than trying to spell it off the top of your head. So... it's not that you can't spell for shit (I wandered through some of your other posts to check :) but rather than you're a visual speller.
BTW your nym wouldn't refer to GtFalls HS, would it?
Oh, that -- no, I didn't have to stop and "work out pronunciation" on any of the words. Botching the meter tho, that happened a few times, when it didn't flow consistently. Admittedly it does pretty well for a poem that's forcibly constructed to fit a certain theme using certain words.
:)
:) And generally kids failed a word not for not knowing how to spell it, but rather when they thought too much about it instead of just going with the flow of the language, so to speak (oral spelling is a lot like oral grammar; if you stop and think about it, you're liable to get it more wrong than if you just SAY it).
As to how the world has changed, I'm 51, so my perspective spans a few more decades than the average slashdotter
As to spelling bees, when I was in grade school it wasn't a nerd activity, it was something *everyone* participated in (I once got 2nd place for my whole grade school
As to the perceived benefit of "consistent" spelling, someone up above laid out the perfect example of how that would by-design cause confusion and LOSS of context for homonyms -- search for "whey" (as contextually distinct from way and weigh) and you'll find the post.
Very funny sample! I can read it substantially without errors -- its choice of words doesn't bother me, but the rhythm is broken as it stands -- meter isn't consistent.
;)
But English wasn't any tougher 30-40 years ago than it is today... yet kids of that era didn't, and as adults don't, have the problems that kids of our Modren Era do... which in itself points at education, or lack of it, as the culprit.
[beats self with a diagramming tool for typing such an ugly sentence]
Yeah, that's the one that refused to come to mind!
:)
And as it turns out, there are indeed Wiki articles on 'em.
Ah. Personally I find German not so pleasing... but I love Latin, as an amazing logical language with a beauty inherent in its structure. (Tho by now I've forgotten most of my high-school Latin, and all but a few phrases of my Jr.High German, which at the time was still a *required* class.)
The TH part of THin and THey started life as two different letters with different sounds, the thorn and I forget the name of the other one; anyway, that's why in very old manuscripts, you sometimes see them printed differently.
:)
There's probably a wikipedia article on it.
Actually, those are Latin plurals, not Germanic.
Exactly. Parents no longer sit down and read to their preschool-age kids. My mom DID... and I could read at a 4th grade level by the time I was 5 years old -- AND I already had a sufficient grok of phonics (by intuition, not training) that I could work out ANY word, even one I'd never seen before. (The only ones that gave me trouble were irregulars like "Bartholomew" -- where the accents don't fall on the standard syllables.)
Between that, and when spelling/phonics began being taught (in my era, that was in the 2nd grade), it was very easy for me and for most students. Kids who couldn't read, and who couldn't puzzle out new words, were very rare.
But now? Spelling isn't taught until the 4th grade or even later. Phonics often isn't taught at all, another legacy of the "whole word recognition" debacle (if you watch severe dyslexics, you'll see that WWR is how they read -- so the object of WWR was apparently to make everyone read at the level of the lowest common denominator!) I remember when the first WWR experiments came along -- my 5th grade class was one of 'em, and even at that age we KNEW we were being shortchanged compared to the other kids.
As to "odd" spellings like weigh vs way, they DO convey meaning. Frex, a "weigh station" is not the same thing as a "way station".