Several examples of William Shakespeare’s autograph exist, and in not one of them does he spell his name ‘Shakespeare’. This is perhaps not surprising, given that in Shakespeare’s time there were no rules about spelling and no standardized dictionaries.

For Chaucer, almost two centuries earlier, give or take, it was worse – the English of The Canterbury Tales was just one of many mutually near-unintelligible dialects which we, with hindsight, and a good dose of retsrospective 19th-century Germanic philological order, call ‘Middle English’.

Chaucer’s version was the one which, by chance, evolved into Modern English, which is why it is easier for the untutored to read The Canterbury Tales than Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, written in a Middle-English dialect that left no descendants.

Contrast Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote (when April with its sweet showers) with SiÞen þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at Troye (when the siege and assault was ceased at Troy). Ya dig?

And before that, well, what we call Old English is a compendium of even more distinct languages, of which the one current in Wessex eventually prevailed, what King Alfred himself called Englisc.

This is all part of the rich loam whence Modern English developed, with all its foibles and glorious inconsistencies, and the curious fact, (as George Bernard Shaw pointed out) that one workable way of spelling the word fish might be ghoti.

But now we have the Simplified Spelling Society with their campaign to iron it all out, with the aim, they say, of making English easier for children and the generally hard-of-thinking.

What worries me, more than the implication that our heritage should be routinely reduced to the lowest common denominator; even more than the authoritarian, schoolmarmish tone of such an enterprise; is how much it reminds me of manipulations of language used as a tool of social engineering, such that society might run more smoothly were any and all signs of individuality expunged in the name of ‘fairness’. The image of ‘newspeak’ in George Orwell’s 1984 looms darkly in the background.

But what offends me most of all is that such petty-mindedness would, if adopted, sever at one stroke every English-speaker from a thousand years of their own literary heritage (as well as making the exploits of Geoffrey Willans’ and Ronald Searle’s truculent and orthographically challenged schoolboy, Nigel Molesworth, completely unfunny).

But really, doth one protest too much? Or, in the contemporary stylee, am I bovvered? No, not really. The Simplified Spelling Society has been at it for 99 years and has made no measurable headway.

Of course, the quality of Englisc is not static. Hwaet! It changeth, it mutates, it adopts new forms for all us groovy hep droogs to grok, or words to that effect. Long may its catholic appetite for the worldy lingo magnify its protean visage. But never let someone who thinks they know better impose standardization from above. To such vexatious persons one might legitimately respond thus: ‘Are his wits safe? Is he not light of brain?’ and bring to mind King Canute’s apocryphal and futile attempt to halt the flowing tide by Royal Fiat (perhaps because he would have done it in Old Norse.)

But we can rest easy. The language of Caedmon, Cynewulf, Alfred, Langland, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pepys, Spenser, Milton, Swift, Defoe, Fielding, Dryden, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Keats, Burns, Austen, Dickens, Eliot (George and T. S.), Lear, Hardy, Wilde, Shaw, Joyce, Carroll, Woolf, Hemingway, Poe, Thurber, Nash, Spooner, Milligan, Burgess, Ishiguro, Rowling, Rumsfeld, Beckham, Snoop Dogg, David Coleman, Alan Partridge – and, hang it all – Nigel Molesworth – is greater than they.

As any fule kno.