I’m thinking about going to Gloucester. It’s one of the great unpronounceables, unless you heard it spoken before ever seeing it written down, in which case it may be unspellable instead.

The unpronounceable part began in ancient Britain with the plain and forthright Glev, was latinised by the Romans to Glevum castra (a camp or fort), then got complicated when it travelled through the Old English of the Anglo-Saxons, as Gleávan ceaster, to become Gloucester, according to the author of The Place-Names of the English People ( M J C Meiklejohn, writing in 1929 – his Glev is guesswork). Its fellow Mercian towns Leicester, Bicester, Cirencester and Worcester came the same way; Meiklejohn supposes that difficulty pronouncing them led to a tendency to slur, resulting in Gloster, Lester, Bister, Ciceter and Wooster. Evolution, rather than incompetence, would be a less prescriptive view of what happened.

The Gloster Gladiator’s manufacturer began as the Gloucestershire Aircraft Company. Overseas customers had difficulty with the first word so the company changed it to Gloster. But the ducal form is everywhere. And Ciceter? That was Shakespeare’s version in Richard II, three syllables (not to be confused with Chichester – or Chy-chester, heard in a Belfast street in the 1970s, perhaps no longer). Since 1929 Cirencester has evolved again, to be spoken as spelled.

The lexicographer Noah Webster of Connecticut first made a case for rational spelling in the 1780s – spell as you speak. He regarded British practice as undemocratic. In the 1800s there was an outbreak of dictionary wars, when a younger American countered Webster’s dictionaries with his own, preferring traditional spelling. His name? Joseph Emerson Worcester.

A case against rational spelling could be made in a similar way to arguments against straight roads in residential streets, or river-straightening. Cars and floodwaters rush through at speed flattening pedestrians and bridges; the mind races through simplified spellings getting no grip on the evolved shapes and resonances of words. It’s easier to spell them but harder to understand them, and the trace of their history is lost.

There is a related difficulty with prescribing simplicity for children – and often their elders: given a chance they tend to prefer complication. Young children are fond of puns and messing about generally with the sound of words. Short names get longer nick-names. Rhyming slang does the same thing – jam jar (car), currant bun (Sun), J Arthur Rank (bank, possibly).

On the other hand there’s Doctor Foster, who went to Gloucester in the nursery rhyme – although in an early appearance, in Gammer Gurton’s Garland, it was Glos’ter. This Gammer Gurton was nobody’s grandma; the anthology was first published in the late 1700s by the antiquarian and republican Joseph Ritson from Stockton-on-Tees, who was an advocate of phonetic spelling. ‘Dr Forster went to Glo’ster’ appears only in an augmented edition by Francis Douce, published after Ritson’s death – Ritson might have omitted the apostrophe. He and Webster had a point: to keep to Old English spelling does amount to aristocratic nonsense, when you think about it.