From Robert A. Hall Jr's book, Leave Your Language Alone!:

"Correct" spelling, that is, obedience to the rules of English spelling as grammarians and dictionary makes set them up, has come to be a major shibboleth in our society. If I write seet instead of seat, roat instead of wrote, or hite instead of height, it makes no difference whatsoever in the English language, i.e., in my speech and that of others around me; yet we are all trained to give highly unfavorable reactions to such spellings, and to be either amused or displeased with people who know no better than to "misspell" in such a way. This shibboleth serves, as does that of "correct" speech, as a means of social discrimination: we can class people among the sheep or the goats according as they measure up to the standards we set in spelling. Spelling which is more nearly in accord with speech, and which we might logically expect to be considered better than the conventional spelling, thus comes to be not praised, but blamed. Spelling "phonetically" comes equivalent to spelling incorrectly. I once came across a reference to "phonetic" pronunciation, which at first puzzlerd me, since pronunciation can by definitions never be anything but phonetic; it later turned out that the writer was referring to inaccurate pronunciation of a foreign language, such as French est-ce que vous avez "have you?" pronounced in a way which he transcribed ess-ker-vooz-avay. He had come to use the term "phonetic" as equivalent to "incorrect", through the folk use of the term phonetic spelling in the meaning "incorrect spelling".

And before anybody accuses Professor Hall of being some whinging gauchiste from Bolshevik U. trying to destroy the majesty of the English language, I would remind him that he received his doctorate at the University of Rome in 1934, and was quite sympathetic to Italian Fascism.