American Language Supplement 2

by H. L. Mencken

  School children here who spell certain words the American way are not to be held guilty of mistakes that cost them marks in examinations conducted by the London County Council.

  This decision was arrived at after close investigation of the problem as to whether or not children attending London County Council schools should be taught from textbooks in which American spelling and American idiom are used.

  The special committee entrusted with the investigation agreed that there is something to be said for familiarizing English children with the variations in spelling and phraseology – “as distinct from slang”—which have been evolved by a great English-speaking people in another continent.

  1 I am indebted here to Mr. Henry Elkin, of Atlantic City.

  1 I am indebted here to Mr. Maurice Walshe, of London, formerly lecturer in English at the University of Vienna.

  2 Headline in the London Daily Herald, June 10, 1936: “There’s No Place Like Jail.”

  3 Alright, John o’London’s Weekly, March 21.

  1 Ugly and Inaccurate, London Observer, Jan. 2, 1938.

  2 Alright, London Observer, Jan. 23, 1938.

  3 The NED Supplement calls alright “a frequent spelling of all right” and traces it in English use to 1893. It was used by the Westminster Gazette in 1897 and by Lord Curzon in 1925. Webster 1934 dismisses it as “a form commonly found but not recognized by authorities as in good use.” The New Practical Standard refuses to mention it.

  1 Oxford, 1926, p. 415.

  2 Said Basil de Sélincourt in Pomona, or, The Future of English; London, 1928, p. 40: “The Americans have dropped a u out of humour and other words; possibly we should have done so, if they had not.” My italics.

  3 All these examples are from the Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Brothers Fowler; third edition; Oxford, 1934.

  4 In the United States even this solitary exception seems to be doomed. There is a Protestant Episcopal Church of Our Savior in Baltimore.

  5 For discussions of it see the before-mentioned Dictionary of Modern English Usage, p. 415, and the NED under -or and -our.

  1 “Nothing in language,” said Webster somewhat patronizingly in his introduction to his American Dictionary of 1828, “is more mischievous than the mistakes of a great man. It is not easy to understand why a man whose professed object was to reduce the language to some regularity should write author without u and errour and honour with it.”

  2 Snob-Stuff From U.S.A., by Pamela Frankau, London Daily Sketch, Oct. 25: “The novelists have caught the snob epidemic so badly that we are now quite accustomed to find American spelling in English literature. Color may be a quicker way of spelling colour, but a calculation of the time saved in the process would shake Einstein. Me, I guess a twentieth of a second.”

  3 A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, p. 415. Armor, without the u, appeared in nearly all the English and colonial newspapers in 1938, in advertisements of Knight Without Armor, a film version of a novel by James Hilton. This movie was made in England, but its distribution was handled from Hollywood, and all the advertising electrotypes sent out spelled armor in the American manner.

  1 Even in the United States there is some wobbling, e.g., in Philadelphia Inquirer and Cincinnati Enquirer.

  2 Urged on by Dr. George M. Gould (1848–1922), author of a standard medical dictionary and part-author of the incomparable Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, the American Medical Editors’ Association declared for the simple e at Milwaukee, June, 1893.

  3 The English Language in America, Vol. I, p. 350.

  4 I am indebted here to Mr. H. W. Seaman.

  5 Nevertheless, the title of the movie, The Covered Wagon, became The Covered Waggon when it was presented in England. See the film column of the London Daily Telegraph, May 25, 1936.

  1 Charles Kingsley compromised by making it for-ever.

  2 Story and Storey, by Peter Duff, London Observer, Nov. 6, 1938.

  3 From a want-ad in the London Morning Post, Sept. 9, 1935: “Prompt Loans – 4¼ p. c. net yearly on reversions, life interest, incomes, legacies, freeholds, by will or deed.” I should add that some of the advertisers in the same column used nett. I am indebted here to the collection of the late F. H. Tyson, of Hong Kong.

  1 Defenders of Defence, London Times, Oct. 29, 1945. In this editorial, it will be noted, the Times used the American proofreader instead of corrector of the press, its orthodox English equivalent.

  2 July, 1937, p. 376.

  3 Vol. II, p. 905.

  4 Vol. I, 1812, p. 355.

  1 I am told by Mr. Percy A. Houseman, of Haddonfield, N. J., that the decennial index of Chemical Abstracts, an official publication of the American Chemical Society, used aluminium before 1916, but has since used aluminum.

  2 I am indebted here to Mr. Ben Hamilton, Jr.

  3 Style Manual, revised edition, Jan., 1945, p. 48.

  4 Practice or Practise, Journal of the American Medical Association, April 26, 1930, p. 1342.

  5 p. 391, n. 1.

  6 New York, 1925.

  1 The Bowling Green, Saturday Review of Literature, April 24, 1937.

  2 Sulphur and Molasses, Saturday Review of Literature, May 15, 1937.

  3 In 1931 the Canadian Historical Association, the Canadian Geographical Society and the Royal Society of Canada declared for it. Canada Won’t Even Import American Spelling, Baltimore Sun, editorial page, Aug. 5, 1931.

  4 There was one in New York in 1947.

  5 The word was borrowed from the French raquette in the early Sixteenth Century. It was spelled racket by Capt. John Smith in his General Historie of Virginia in 1624 and by John Locke in his Essay Concerning Humane Understanding in 1690. The spelling racquet seems to have arisen as a fashionable affectation during the Nineteenth Century. It did not last long in England. I am indebted here to Mr. H. W. Seaman.

  6 Time, Dec. 10, p. 52. I am indebted here to Mr. Charles J. Lovell.

  7 American Spelling Wins Recognition in London Schools, Sept. 21, 1938.

  3. THE SIMPLIFIED SPELLING MOVEMENT

  The Simplified Spelling Board, which walked high, wide and handsome during the lifetime of its angel, Andrew Carnegie, began to fade after his death in 1919, and since then not much has been heard from it.1 But its English opposite number, the Simplified Spelling Society, is still affluent and active, and a large number of private spelling reformers whoop up various seductive but antagonistic schemes in both countries. One of the latter is Fred S. C. Wingfield, a Chicago printer who launched what he called Fwnetik Orthqgrafi in 1928, and has since supplemented it with a rather less alarming Systematized Spelling. Wingfield is a thoughtful student of the subject, and some of his publications are of decided value – for example, his study of the vowels in the present English alphabet,2 and his discussion of the projects of other spelling reformers.3 Among the latter he distinguishes five groups, as follows:

  1. “Those wishing to improve the spelling of only certain words of the present orthography.”

  2. “Those wishing to spell phonetically by the addition of new letters to the present alphabet.”

  3. “Those wishing to spell phonetically by the inversion of some of the letters of the alphabet.”

  4. Those proposing an entirely new alphabet.

  5. Those proposing to use the present alphabet, but with the addition of digraphs, e.g., ah, au, aw, ay, ey, iw, iy, uh, uw.

  There is a specimen of Wingfield’s Fwnetik Orthqgrafi, as it ran in 1931, in AL4, pp. 404–405. Since then he has changed it considerably, and by 1944 it had become Fonetik Crthografi.1 In most of its forms it has used dh for the and the two sounds of th, j for ee, q for the o of for and the a of father, and ei for the a of name, but otherwise it has shown a great deal of variation from time to time, with a general trend toward simplification. In its latest incarnation it turns the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence into the following:

  Hwen in dh kors v hiumn jvents, it bjkvmz nesiseri fcr wvn pipl ta dizqlv dh politikl
baendz hwitsh haev k’nektd dhem widh anvdhr, and tu asu:m amvng dh Pqwrz v dh r:th, dh separeit and jkwal steishn tu hwitsh dh lcz v neitshr and v neitshrz Gqd entaitl dhm, a djsnt rjspekt tu dh opinynz v maenkaind rjkwairz dht dhei shwd diklaer dh kcz’z hwitsh impel dhem tu dh separeishn.

  Here, says Wingfield, “nearly 11.9% of the words are unchanged; more than 28.4% are but slightly altered. Consequently 40.3% of the words can be immediately read without any prior study of the system.” Even so, it seems to be too much for the customers, so its author has devised the aforesaid Systematized Spelling, which he calls “a reformed orthography for a new eera,” as a sort of concession to their weakness. What it comes to is shown by the following rendering of the Gettysburg Address:

  4 score and 7 years ago our fothers braut foerth on thiss continent a new nation, conceved in liburty, and dedicated tu the proposition that all men ar created eequal. Now we ar engaged in a graet civil waur, testing whether that nation or eny nation so conceved and so dedicated, can long endure. We ar met on a graet batlefeeld of that waur. We hav com tu dedicate a poertion of that feeld as a fienal resting-place for those hu here gave their lives that that nation miet liv. It is altugether fitting and propur that we shud du thiss. But in a larger sence, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallo, thiss ground. The brave men, livving and ded, hu strugled here, hav consecrated it.…

  Another diligent spelling reformer is Ralph Gustafson, of Moorestown, N. J. His system is based upon the Anglic of the late Professor R. E. Zachrisson, of Uppsala,1 and an English scheme called Simpl Orderli Speling, but he has introduced modifications in order to get rid of “a strickli British stiel uv pronunsiaeshon tu wich moest Amerikanz ar not akustomed.” In October, 1945, he sent out a circular warning his followers that his system “iz exsperimental and must not be regarded az definit or fienal.”

  After 1941 one of the most persistent American advocates of a wholesale reform in orthography was the Hon. Robert L. Owen, a former Senator from Oklahoma.2 He had designed a new alphabet, adapted to all languages, at some time in the past, but it was the attack on Pearl Harbor, according to his own story, that determined him “to perfect this matter.”3 His alphabet, at the start, greatly resembled the series of strokes, curves and hooks used by the principal systems of shorthand, and the different characters in a word were usually joined by ligatures,4 but he later simplified it, and in its final form it consisted of about 40 characters, to be printed separately as the letters of ordinary English are printed.5 The hon. gentleman’s years and past services got him friendly attention in Congress, and his pronunciamentos were frequently printed in the Appendix to the Congressional Record by amiable Senators and Representatives,6 but when he had a hearing before the Senate committee on foreign relations, in 1945, his claim that his alphabet was “a perfect key to all languages – a key which can be learned in one day” – suffered somewhat under the cross-examination of the learned Senator Theodore Francis Green, of Rhode Island. His chief adjutant in his crusade was Dr. Janet H. C. Meade, who also suffered at the same hands. She appeared as secretary of the World Language Foundation, Inc.

  Wingfield occasionally reports on the schemes of rival reformers, with criticisms. Thus when a lady by the name of Miss Ruby Oliver Foulk announced “a refrmeishn v dh Ixglish laexgwidzh az wel az a nuli dyvaizd speling”1 he dismissed it on the ground that, like the International Phonetic Alphabet, it made use of new characters – “an aelfa-laik keratr fcr dh vqwl in father, army, not, aunt, guard, and a simble rjsembling Grjk thjta fcr dh vqwl in full, wolf, foot” – and that these characters collided with the fact that “qur taipraitrz, lainotaips, mqnotaip mashjnz n dzhqb fqnts” were “nqt ikwipt widh” them. And when a Canadian brother, Ernest B. Roberts, of Toronto, launched a new system in a pamphlet entitled “Spel-Rid-Ryt” Wingfield reported that he could not “giv iz prapozd rifcrm a veri hai reiting, fcr it pru:vz ta by simpli anadhr nu letr skjm.” Two of the new letters, he admitted, were “wel chosen: tailed n for ng-singer and the IPA sign for sh,” but he had his doubts about “a q-like letter for o-ode,” a reversed c for ch, an e-like character for th-thin, and a reversal of the e-like letter for th-then. So far as I know, Wingfield never examined the system projected by L. Julian McIntyre in 1925,2 but it was noticed and dismissed loftily by an anonymous reviewer in American Speech.3 Its author described it as “no panfuli rot out formula brot tu perfekshon bi yerz of pashent studi, but merli a common sens us of the karakturz olreadi provided and aksepted az substitutz for the spokn word” and estimated that it would save the American people more than $5,000,000 a year, but he apparently found that not many of them were interested. William Russell seems to have had no better luck with a far more modest scheme that he proposed in 1946,1 though he had kind words from a number of respected authorities on speech, including Arthur G. Kennedy and Josiah Combs. Russell mentioned Wingfield’s Fonetik Crthqgrafi politely, but did not come out for it. His system consisted mainly of shortened forms that are already in more or less use, e.g., apothem, brunet, burlesk, catalog, cigaret, fantom, foto, furlo, gild, nabor, nite, rime, sulfur, theater, tho, thoro, thru, vinyard, wilful and wo. But “such forms as BarBQ and R U going 2 the Cside,” he cautioned, “are not to be recommended.”

  A great many other private spelling reformers are in practise (or have been recently in practise) in the Republic, e.g., William J. Nixon, of Philadelphia; Iva Doty, of Bellflower, Calif.; Andrew C. Clark, of New Milford, Conn.; J. F. Hayden, of High Point, N. C.; William Simms Prosser, of San José, Calif.; John T. Gause, of New York; Carl A. Berg, of Minot, N. Dak.; William McDevitt, of San Francisco;2 Edwin B. Davis, of Rutgers University; James Juvenal Hayes, of Oklahoma City; Arthur G. Smith, of Bryan, O.; Drew Allison, of San Antonio, Tex.; Robert E. Bullard, of Takoma Park, Md.; Elmer G. Still, of Livermore, Calif.; Frank C. Laubach and R. F. Chapin. Chapin’s scheme was set forth in the Rotarian in 1939,3 but I have heard no more of it. Bullard’s, so far as I know, has never been printed, but he tells me4 that its essential points are as follows: use ä for the a-sound in hat, ae for that in ate, and plain a for that in halt; drop c, q, w and x altogether, and y as a consonant; restrict e to the sound in get, i to that in it, o to that in only, g to that in get, u to that in under and sunk; use y for the oo-sound in suit and boot; use ei for the i-sound in right and sign, and ie for that in beat and reek; use au for the vowel in cow. Bullard estimates that his proposed changes would reduce the length of about 80% of all common words, leave 17% as now, and lengthen 3%.

  Gause presents his project in the form of a game-book.5 He proposes to use y with its tail turned to the right for the long i, and to indicate the other long vowels by putting dashes over them. He offers a capital f turned backward for the sound of th in that and a v upside down for the diphthong in house. Like most other spelling reformers he substitutes k for hard c, s for soft c, kw for qu, and ks for x. He puts c to use by giving it the sound of oo in good, and q by giving it that of a in all. He indicates the sound of th in three by putting an h before his reversed f, that of ch in church by using tsh, that of the middle consonant in vision by j, and that of the j of jig by dj. Nixon’s system, which he calls E Z Speling,1 is a sort of shorthand. He advocates using & for and, u for you, 2 for to, too and two, c for see and sea, $ for dollar, t for tee and tea, r for are, i for eye, 8 for ate, x for ex, etc. He is a foe of all redundant letters and uses iland, leag, lether, lo (low), mor, orfan, revu (review), si (sigh), tung, yern and hol (whole). His system, of course, would vastly multiply homophones. He attempts to get rid of this difficulty by the use of spaces, so that tal e (tally), for example, is thus differentiated from tale. But there are plenty of other cases in which he seems unable to solve the problem, e.g., borrow and borough, both of which become boro; soup, which becomes sup, and glean, which becomes glen. He makes heavy use of figures and of the sounds of letters, so that expose becomes x pose, eyebrow i bro, and energy n er g. Sometimes he slips on pronunciations, as when he turns nucleus into nuclus and opi
um into opum.

  One of the simplest of the American schemes of reformed spelling is that of Hayes, who is professor of English at Oklahoma City University.2 He rejects c, x and q and adds no new characters, so that his alphabet is reduced to twenty-three letters. Like Gause, he proposes to indicate the long sound of vowels by putting dashes over them. The ordinary form of a is used for the sound in father and alms, ā for that in claim and paint, and ae for that in bat and clam. Ordinary e is used in beg and crept, and ē in creep and degree. Ordinary o suffices in order, but ō is substituted in toad and enroll. Ordinary u is used both in cases where it is pure, as in up and shun, and in cases where it is preceded by the palatal glide, as in pure and refuse. To indicate its sound in urn and first, ur is used – and Hayes disregards the possible confusion with pure. For the sound in fair and error, er is used, and for that in wool and good, uu. Oi is used in boy, toil, etc., oo in food, do, etc., and ou in out, bough, crowd, etc. Kw is generally substituted for qu, tsh for the ch-sound in change, zh for the first consonant in azure, ks for x in vex, and gz for x in exist. The sound of th in thin is represented as now, but in this it is changed to dh. The result is as follows:

  Our Fadhr hoo art in hevn, haelōed bē dhī nām. Dhī kingdm kum. Dhi wil be dun in urth aez it iz in hevn. Giv us dhis dā our dālē bred. Aend forgiv us our dets aez we forgiv our detrz. Aend lēd us nat intoo temptāshn, but dēlivr us frum ēvl, for dhīn iz dhu kingdm, aend dhu pour, aend dhu glōrē, for evr. Amen.1