Further evidence, as if you need it, that in this lawless, immoral modern world where anything goes, all the rules and values we creaky puritanical oldsters learned back in the golden age of harmony and respect and corporal punishment have … Oh, look: I'm so upset, the sentence got away from me.

All too many things are getting away from me these days. My brain, once a steel trap, has become a colander, leaking names, passwords, state capitals and French verbs into the collars of my shirts and behind the sofa until sometimes, when I sneeze, I swear I'm hearing an echo.

But as the years pass and we become increasingly bewildered by the world, we cling to the simple truths gouged into our psyches when they were young and soft like wet concrete:

Thirty days hath September (all together now), April, June and November.

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

Righty tighty, lefty loosey.

I before e, except after c -- extra points if you know the second couplet -- or when sounded like a, as in neighbor and weigh.

But not in Britain.

School guidelines newly issued by the British government include a "Support for Spelling" document that advises teachers in primary or elementary schools it's not worth teaching ol' "i before e."

Why? Because there are too many exceptions.

I ask you: When has that ever stopped anyone?

The fraudulence of this alleged "rule" is not new. Words like "their," "either" and "weird" are not recent foreign acquisitions or hipster cyberslang. "I before e" was a sham when we first recited it; ask anyone named Keith.

English, and here I apologize to the people who think it is what God speaks, is an orthographic mess. It is a sewer -- I say this with fierce affection -- of fermented ancient runoff from German, Norse, French and Latin, and its confused provenance shows in the unnatural acts it forces on the alphabet.

Rough dough? Good food? Whole whale? William Shakespeare was wont to spell his own name different ways, and he practically invented the cranky English teacher.

Not that I am excusing or condoning poor spelling, an epidemic that, were it as deadly as it is widespread, would make bubonic plague look like hiccups.

I'm just saying that trying to confine it within doggerel rules is as misguided as trying to similarly simplify emotion. How hopelessly inadequate is this other childhood verse:

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in a baby carriage?

In the real world, there are a thousand variations: First comes hopeless crush, then comes a series of failed co-dependent relationships, then comes a restraining order, then comes infertility treatments … life's rich pageant is far more complicated than a jump-rope rhyme. That's what makes it interesting. And keeps lawyers in business.

Efforts to simplify the spelling of English so that it's as easy and predictable as a dry turkey breast have always failed, and for good reason. Inglish luks dum speld fonetikly. Besides, we can't agree to spell it the way it's pronounced because we can't agree how to pronounce it. We might have to go to war with England and Australia over vowels, and we'd end up having as much trouble reading Harry Potter as we do watching BBC America.

(And don't point to the dictionary. It's rude. Besides, you don't have one anymore. If you did, you'd know that dictionary pronunciations make heavy use of so many misshapen conjoined letters and cryptic marks that if we wrote that way, English would look like one of those speckled protest-banner languages from Eastern Europe.)

No, we should just learn to spell the hard way: By reading, memorization and practice. The same way you filled your head with presidents and drink recipes and state capitals. Look how well those have held up.

Remember: Language is an art, not a sceince.