Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling

by David Wolman

  Righting the Mother Tongue

  From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling

  David Wolman

  For Mom and Pop

  I would advise you not to consult geese in matters of spelling.

  —E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1. War of the Words

  Chapter 2. Crossed

  Chapter 3. Regime Change

  Chapter 4. Page Setup

  Chapter 5. Valiant Exterminators of Dialectical Vermin

  Chapter 6. Outlaw Orthography

  Chapter 7. A First Class Man

  Chapter 8. Spellraisers

  Chapter 9. Of Yachts and Yetterswippers

  Chapter 10. Fixers

  Chapter 11. The Rubarb on the Internet

  Epilogue: The Portland Spelling Bee

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  WAR OF THE WORDS

  “There is no excuse, however, for ‘thru’ for through from any point of view.”

  Benjamin Ide Wheeler, September 15, 19061

  THE STUDENTS IN STANFORD University’s “Calamity Class” of 1906 must have thought the world was falling apart. Five months before graduation, the Great Earthquake leveled much of San Francisco. More than 3,000 people perished, and the destruction and subsequent fires left some 225,000 residents homeless. Overseas, Italy’s Mount Vesuvius had just erupted, again. Russia was recovering from a revolution and war with Japan. A tsunami in Hong Kong and earthquakes in Ecuador and India had killed tens of thousands of people.

  The United States was not engaged in military conflict at the time, but the Spanish-American War was fresh in the collective memory. On the other side of the Atlantic, Europeans were planting the seeds of political foment that would lead to World War I, and, closer to home, Upton Sinclair’s muckraking exposé, The Jungle, was shocking readers with its grisly portrayal of working conditions in America’s turn-of-the-century stockyards.

  Thirty miles to the south of the devastated City by the Bay, the earthquake had caused considerable, although less catastrophic, damage on the Stanford campus. Still, the graduates of 1906 had been dubbed the “Calamity Class.” Their four years at Stanford were marred by a trio of campus tragedies: A typhoid epidemic in 1903, the death of Mrs. Stanford in 1905, followed by the Great Earthquake. They finally celebrated graduation on September 15, 1906.2

  It was a typically sunny day on campus when Benjamin Ide Wheeler began his commencement address. Wheeler, president of the University of California and a renowned language expert, opened his speech by commenting on the recent destruction wrought by nature, and humanity’s inherent resourcefulness and generosity in times of adversity. But then he turned to a battle that was gripping the nation. A rebellion was building momentum and Wheeler wanted it quashed. If the revolutionaries triumphed, he warned, the outcome promised “loss and waste to intercourse and culture.”

  America was at war over words. The composition of words, to be precise—what some people call orthography and the rest of us call spelling.* In its rise from a motley collection of Germanic tongues crossbred with French and Latin, spiced up by languages the world over and then churned through the lexicographic contortion machine of history, English, already on its way to becoming the lingua franca, had developed a nasty not-so-secret secret: its spelling system was a mess.

  Amidst the thicket of foreign words, silent letters, and rule exceptions of English spelling lies more order than some people might expect, and likewise more chaos than others would like to admit. But when measured by the commonsense yardstick of consistent sound-to-letter correspondence, there’s no denying that English spelling is a nightmare. Compared to the likes of German, Spanish, Italian, Finnish, and many other languages, our orthography is, as one scholar puts it, “flamboyantly inconsistent.”3 Renaissance, millennium, diarrhea, bulletin, camaraderie, accommodation, feign, entrepreneur, rhythm, miscellaneous, cemetery, yacht, fluorescent, temperamental, license, perseverance, misspelling—do any of these words ring bells of confusion? Not even occasionally?

  As native speakers and readers, we rarely, if ever, stop to consider that the sound commonly represented by the letters sh, as in shine, is the same sound in sugar, emotion, omniscience, charade, social, and fissure.4 Imagine the bewildered look on the faces of people learning English as a second language when they first hear about these sh shenanigans, or when the teacher writes out rough, dough, bough, and through on the blackboard, and then says that each is pronounced differently. These are quick examples, but they get right to the point, as do silent letters like the g in gnarly and the k in knuckle, inconsistencies like mask versus masquerade and fear versus interference, and geographic variations like program and honor in the US, compared with programme and honour in England.

  For nearly as long as English has had a relatively stable or “settled” spelling system, there have been people complaining about it and campaigning for change. They’ve wielded a variety of arguments: A more phonetic spelling system would return English to a purer form, improve literacy, make time for students to tackle other areas of study, and reduce printing and proofreading costs. One of the most energetic times in the history of spelling reform was the turn of the twentieth century. “Philologists Declare War on Cumbrous Spelling of English,” reported the New York Herald on March 18, 1906.5 “Spelling Campaign Praised as Today’s Real Need: Simplified Spelling Reform is Indorsed by Leading Citizens,” declared the Chicago Evening Post.6

  As a professor of philology (the predecessor to today’s historical linguistics), Wheeler was a certifiable lover of words and kept careful watch over news from the front lines of this escalating conflict. Still, a commencement address about spelling? It doesn’t exactly carry the weight one usually associates with such occasions, especially for an audience that had been through so much.

  But that’s the thing: Spelling matters. In Wheeler’s time, spelling reform was no obscure topic. Heavy hitters from politics, education, business, and art were lining up in support of spelling reform. The newly elected president, Theodore Roosevelt, was a proponent of a revision scheme known as simplified spelling. In 1906 he began using some of the three hundred novel spellings suggested by a group called the Simplified Spelling Board, including dipt for dipped, rime for rhyme, and tho for though. He ordered the Government Printing Office to apply the new spellings to all future materials, although the order was soon revoked.7

  The Simplified Spelling Board was captained by the esteemed bookworm Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal System for the classification of library books. Joining him on the board were such influential figures as Columbia University President James Murray Butler, Stanford University President David Starr Jordan, Supreme Court Justice David J. Brewer, and Century Magazine editor Richard Watson Gilder. Steel baron Andrew Carnegie provided financial backing for the campaign.

  Other luminaries also wanted to take action against spelling’s weird twists and turns. (Weird was spelled wyrd one thousand years ago.8 So much for “i before e.”) Mark Twain had commented on the absurdity of English spelling, and Huck Finn’s resistance to being “sivilized” is perhaps one of the most memorable misspellings in American literature. Playwright George Bernard Shaw repeate
dly railed against English orthographic conventions, which he saw as part and parcel of the “middle-class morality” satirized in Pygmalion. In the play, Shaw wrote words such as show and you’ve as “shew” and “youve,” and he famously quipped that combining the sounds derived from the gh in cough, the o in women, and the ti in nation would allow a person to pronounce the word ghoti as “fish.” Journalist H. L. Mencken would soon weigh in on the matter, buttressing a call for reform by reminding his readers that notables such as Charles Darwin, Lord Tennyson, Sir John Lubbock, and Sir J. A. H. Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), were all in favor of some kind of orthographic adjustment.

  Spelling reform could not be easily dismissed. Practicality wasn’t a primary concern for the believers because it never crossed their minds that this undertaking might be unrealistic. The atmosphere of the day, while reeking of industrial pollution, was filled with a sense of can-do. On the language front, it had been only eighty years since Noah Webster completed his magnum opus: An American Dictionary of the English Language. Eager to distinguish the newly independent United States from what he saw as the too-close-for-comfort cultural grip that England exerted from afar, Webster successfully altered the spelling of hundreds of words. For Americans, gaol became jail, publick became public, travelled became traveled, centre became center, and valour became valor—all because of Webster’s handiwork. If a Connecticut farm boy could grow up to produce such a comprehensive and scholarly product as a dictionary, and if men could dig a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, surely across-the-board modification of the spelling system was within the realm of possibility.

  In his commencement address, Wheeler outlined his opposition to spelling reform. With invective, he argued that the stakes of this battle were unimaginably high. That he shared the stage that day with Stanford’s president and Simplified Spelling Board member David Starr Jordan, added an element of tension to the ceremony, and underscored the sense of urgency with which Wheeler spoke:

  The English language is not the property of the United States, still less of its government; it is a precious possession of the English-speaking world, and the moral authority to interfere in its regulation must arise out of the entire body and not from a segment thereof…Any radical change such as, for instance, would be involved in phonetic writing, would have the effect of cutting us off from the language of Shakespeare and the English bible making this a semi-foreign idiom to be acquired by special study.

  The proposal gradually to introduce, through the co-operation of volunteers, a certain number of new spellings, and then, when these are well under way, presumably certain others, seems to promise an era of ghastly confusion in printing offices and in private orthography and heterography, as well as much irritation to readers’ eyes and spirits.

  Irritated spirits indeed. But what about those of us whose spirits are irritated by the difficulty of the current system? I doubt that many bad spellers are drawn to careers in philology or linguistics, which makes Wheeler’s stance somewhat predictable, not to mention biased. He did take a moment in his speech to acknowledge that the English spelling code has its disadvantages, but Wheeler’s concession was minimal; he was not going to waste breath expressing sympathy for the other side.

  Besides, how could a true man of letters not embrace English spelling in all its organic and idiosyncratic glory? Orthography, and irregular spellings in particular, retain the etymological fossils that give words historical richness and poetic power, and in turn give philologists something to do with their time. In contrast, one can’t help but wonder whether Stanford President Jordan, an ichthyologist by training, became so incurably irked by the rest of the world’s inability to correctly spell ichthyology, let alone pronounce it, that he viewed spelling reform as a way to overcome this problem of professional identity. (Ichthyologists, by the way, study fish.)

  That morning at Stanford one hundred years ago, Wheeler spoke of what he perceived to be the hazards of a “private orthography” spinning out of control and leading to catastrophic misunderstanding. Yet spelling has always had a private element to it. Despite our shared cultural heritage bequeathed by teachers, writers, poets, playwrights, and lexicographers, our understanding of a word’s meaning is by definition uniquely our own because reading and writing first happen inside our heads. The same is true for spelling. Even for the spelling bee contestant onstage, spelling is, at first, a private enterprise, during which a person chooses on the fly whether to spell a word this way or that.

  Multiply those micromoments of word consideration and construction over a lifetime, and suddenly you get the impression that dealing with spelling occupies a serious chunk of our waking lives. Strangely, though, the letters and order of letters in words are not things most of us, with the exception of lexicographers and spelling bee enthusiasts, spend much time thinking about.

  That may change. In the century since Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, spelling rebels were forced underground, but they didn’t give up completely. Today, while reformers struggle to overcome a fractious constituency and dispiriting odds, a spelling uprising may be brewing without them; a revolution ignited by innovations born on the very Silicon Valley campus where Wheeler issued his warning one hundred years ago. But to discern what’s on the horizon for spelling, it will help to see where English orthography has been and learn what it’s been thru.

  WHEN I WAS growing up, spelling was a source of substantial frustration. In Mrs. Damp’s fourth-grade class, students were assigned one of three spelling books: The best spellers had the red one, the middle-of-the-road spellers had the orange one, and the more challenged spellers, myself included, had the yellow one. The whole thing blindsided me. It was as if overnight I went from being just like everyone else, to being singled out as one of the dumb kids. Since when did everyone master the art of spelling? Where had I been when it happened and why was everyone putting so much stock in this particular skill?

  That was in the early 1980s, and spelling bees were not yet a televised phenomenon. But I knew about them, and the pageantry surrounding the coronation of spelling wunderkind. How could I not? Those kids, and even my classmates with their red books, seemed to possess superhuman powers. It was the ease with which they performed spelling operations that I couldn’t fathom. I was still wrestling with the-le ending of paddle, handle, and maple, compared to the el ending of angel, camel, and shovel, to say nothing of angle, level, and sandal. Toward the end of the spelling worksheets came the big-money words, like different (Is it a-n-t or e-n-t? It sounds the same either way!), restaurant (That can’t be right. Where’s the o I’m hearing?), and license. (Please, Mrs. Damp: Confusing the c and s yet again is going to be the death of me. Just move on already, to the foods of ancient Mesopotamia or even long division. Anything but this.) Then, as we wrapped up the day’s spelling exercises, I would steal a glance at some of my classmates’ red workbooks and see encyclopedia, curriculum, courteous, extraterrestrial, interference, and xylophone, written up near the top of the page. I was stunned. Those are their easy words?

  The thing is that I couldn’t, and still can’t, see words in my head in high-def the way talented spellers can. When I see a decent-sized word for the first time, my brain doesn’t dice it into digestible, conveniently remembered groups of letters. Instead, all at once, I see this lengthy horizontal blob, and for a nanosecond the word looks like a cross between schadenfreude and HTML code. At that instant, my spirits get smacked with the same panic felt back in grade school, watching brainier classmates effortlessly write curriculum and interference as if those words were as short and simple as nerd and envy.

  The deepest psychological wounds were inflicted at home. My brother Dan has always had a head for spelling. He’s the youngest of four children and my parents encouraged him, intentionally or otherwise, in ways that built self-confidence and inoculated him against developmental pitfalls usually reserved for the baby of the family. Put another way: Dan was a gifted childhood speller, o
ur parents praised him for it, and that’s all well and good.

  Except that I was also in the room. At dinnertime in our home outside Boston, I dreaded the impromptu spelling quizzes. It was as if the warm air wafting up from rotisserie chicken, green beans, and mashed potatoes hit some kind of mnemonic tripwire, reminding my mother of spelling bees from her childhood. Or maybe she thought some lighthearted word challenges would be a fun way to hear about what we’d been learning in school. What followed was a nerve-racking kind of game show minus the prizes. It was a perfect way to celebrate Dan’s spelling smarts, while simultaneously leveling the playing field of brotherly combat that, due to our age difference, was lopsided in my favor.

  Mom would choose a word and ask me to spell it. If I got it wrong, and the words were just tough enough that I usually did, either because I didn’t know them or because anxiety got the better of me, my mom would then turn to Dan for the correction. I’d be lying if I said I could recall specific words from that bygone era–it’s amazing I haven’t suppressed the memories entirely. But I bet some of them were the same words that would dog me today were it not for the marvel of spell-check: unnecessary, torment, vengeance, guaranteed.