To be reliant is to rely on your spelling skills. Check these KS3 words beginning at rel and see how many you can spell correctly.
"Fame is damaging when people become reliant on it for their sense of self, and their identity, when fame is linked to how you see yourself." - Daniel Radcliffe.
How many ways of misspelling the word "self" can you imagine? Perhaps the s sound might be made by a c? The e could be replaced with the ea digraph, maybe. The l might be doubled and a ph used for the f. Using all of these options would result in the spelling "ceallph", which looks ridiculous, of course.
"Self" has actually had an incredibly varied past, in terms of its spelling. Older forms of the word include "silf", "sylf", "seolf", "solf", "selph", "suelf", "sulfe", "sulve", "selve", "seulve" and many, many others.