Grammar moment: Yes, spelling really IS important

This was something brought up in Jay Leno's "Headlines" this week -- it falls under the category of Stupid Criminals. One of the justifications for making education widely available is that by giving people an education, we give them skills to succeed in an honest job, so they don't need to turn to crime.

Turns out, a good education is useful even for a life of crime. A man attempted to rob a bank, handing a note to a teller. The problem was that three quarters of the words in the note were misspelled, some severely, so the teller couldn't understand the note. Among the errors, the would-be bank robber was fairly random about what vowel to use, and he liked to stick in the occasional silent e at random, and he had difficulty dotting i's and crossing t's -- for example, he wrote "gel" whe he meant "get" -- Leno doesn't have the original on his website yet, but I'll paste it in when I get it.

The upshot was that the bank teller, upon receiving the note, just couldn't figure out what it meant. And by the time someone could figure it out, the would-be bank robber was canned.