A few times in the past I've seen these comments about spelling and how the people that pull others up on it are snivelling pedants, nit-pickers or, now, "left-wing libtards". This is why those people are wrong.

Spelling is about language, and language is culture. Our cultures, from local to national to global are defined by our languages, of which there are about 6,900 currently spoken in the world, with some on the edge of extinction. Loose your language and you loose your culture, end of. Similarly, how we care and use our languages reflects how we care for our cultures, how we propagate and maintain the core aspects of culture in the myriad of ways we use language; naming, describing, remembering, creating and so on. Language is precious, unique and worth defending whilst you have the life in you to form a thought or utter a word.

We all make mistakes, and my spelling is bloody awful. However, when our greatest institutions cannot even be bothered to get the spelling correct on media being distributed around the world, then there is a real problem. Because they don't care about the simplest of things about the language, and they don't give a toss about their culture. Let it go, and the cultures we purport to care for so much is on the slide. More.