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

by David Wolman

  Dewey was assiduously building support for the Spelling Reform Association. The president of Oberlin College, a member of the Board of Regents for the University of Arizona, and a professor at the University of Texas all wrote in to give him the thumbs-up, as did a correspondent from the Boston Times, who suggested that he and Dewey team up to publish a weekly newspaper printed with simplified spelling. Little old ladies in Alabama; newspaper editors from New York to Wyoming; a St. Louis printer who had published a phonetic edition of The Gospel of Matthew; the Illinois State Teachers’ Association, a Boston shoemaker, and the publishing company of Funk & Wagnall’s, the owners of which wrote Dewey in 1890 to say how much they “heartily believe[d] in the movement,” and wanted to publish a dictionary that would meet Dewey’s approval.19

  One such letter of support was from the Education Office of Nova Scotia, dated June 12, 1896. Channeling the spirit of Benjamin Franklin, Mr. A. H. Mackay warns Dewey of anticipated disapproval from literary types, who are “undoubtedly afflicted with that conservatism so characteristic of the unscientific literary hack…Our literary men have a tendency to become fossilized as they are in China…And if you allow the United States to be controlled by them alone, in a generation or two you will be as conservative as the Celestial kingdom itself.”20

  By the time Benjamin Ide Wheeler delivered his the 1906 commencement address to Stanford’s Calamity Class, Dewey’s good cause had operatives on the faculties of Yale (five), Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, MIT, Bucknell, Reed College, Whitman College, Western Reserve, Lafayette College, the Alabama Girls’ Technical Institute, and Jefferson Medical College—to name a handful. “And why have these men suggested and effected changes in the language?” asked John Earle Uhler, a professor of English at Louisiana State University and chairman of the local Simplified Spelling Leag. “For the very same reason that engineers rear levees along a river, dig new channels, dam old outlets—to make the river serve man, not control him.” The public urgently needed to be led out of this “orthografic swamp.”

  But what did Dewey actually do as leader of this rebellion? During meetings, Board members would sometimes debate various schemes or word revisions. Other times, they drifted off topic, discussing Shakespeare’s Othello one month, politics the next.* When proceedings were steered back to the subject of spelling reform, Dewey would chime in about specific word alterations, but he worried about putting the cart before the horse. He knew that in the eyes of the public, spelling reform treaded precariously close to navel gazing for the rich. Until the movement could garner wider support, he felt that combating this credibility shortage was of paramount concern, and that nitpicking among themselves over a certain vowel inflection or problems caused by the c in backing and lacking would not move things forward. So Dewey focused instead on generating political momentum.

  The whiff of realism in his approach may appear at odds with the pie-in-the-sky nature of Dewey’s chosen crusade. But dismissing his aims as quixotic belies his previous accomplishment, as well as the lasting legacies of individuals like Johnson and Webster. If they could wrestle the language into the pages of a dictionary, and if Dewey himself could create a system for organizing all “human knowledge in print,” why should he have thought that tackling the spelling system was in any way out of reach?

  To prevent the movement from appearing fringe, Dewey drew upon the same compulsive-guy resources that made him a champion to-do-list maker and diary keeper, and built a coalition. He wrote, collected, and organized, then wrote, collected, and organized some more, corresponded with members and potential members, and authored umpteen commentaries and letters to editors in a nonstop effort to attract publicity. In an 1891 note to the editor of the Albany Times, he waxed on about whether employee should have the second e on the end.21 In another letter, he complains to a dictionary publisher about adverb formations—academically from academic, or geologically from geologic, which he felt were ill-conceived constructions, and that the words could stand on their own without the ly. “Is there any authority for it, or any serious authority against it?”22 He was trying to bludgeon his fellow countrymen into changing their habits of language, one exhaustive communiqué at a time. (The reply to his note about adverbs wasn’t warm: “There is the best authority for it,” wrote a Mr. Charles Scott, “namely the law of the English language, which allows the formation of an adverb in ‘ly’ from any adjective whatever. The authority of next greatest weight, the fact of current use, of the given form, happens, by various slight accidents of history which I could state at length if necessary, not to exist for most words of this kind.”)

  Dewey could lock horns over minutiae one minute, yet in the next speak of “gradual” reform—“a wise, conservative campaign.” No Benjamin Franklin–styled alphabectomy, and no wholesale rewrite of the lexicon. Change would be delicate and incremental, bordering on undetectable. This practical view of what could and could not be achieved, and how fast, shaped Dewey’s philosophy throughout a life of armchair activism.23 That didn’t mean the orthography of his efficiency-obsessed dreams wasn’t substantially different looking from the spelling of his time.* But Dewey knew the reform movement’s legitimacy depended on a cautious pace, and he incessantly tried to distinguish his campaign from what he saw as wacky and unresearched proposals put forth by overeager “cranks and extremists who have made the cause look ridiculous.”24

  By the look of the extensive collection of spelling-related postcards, letters, newspaper clippings, and other materials piled into the Melvil Dewey Papers at Columbia, one might conclude that he was a pathological hoarder. With all that paper, he built in his mind a fortress, shielding him from scorn and ridicule. The hundreds of names he had gathered in support of the cause were a far cry from comprising a critical mass. Yet by surrounding himself with the hard-copy weight of encouragement from people across the continent, some of whom really did carry legitimate influence, Dewey hypnotized himself into thinking the movement was chugging along.

  ANDREW CARNEGIE ENDOWED the Simplified Spelling Board to the tune of about twenty-five thousand dollars a year for the decade beginning in 1906.25 In what appears to have been just that initial dinner with Dewey and a few follow-up meetings, the librarian-metric-system-enthusiast-spelling-reform advocate had talked the tycoon out of parting with an impressive sum. Of course, from Dewey’s perspective, Carnegie’s backing was no lucky strike. It was another step toward the inevitable new orthography. The details of the new spelling system were beside the point; the current one was a mess, everybody knew it, and with enough political and public support, a better one could be crafted and strategically implemented.

  During his first year or two supporting the Simplified Spelling Board, Carnegie most likely wanted to see what this “language commission” could accomplish. In the vernacular of today’s venture philanthropy, his donations were seed money. That he went well beyond just a year or two of support reveals Carnegie’s commitment to the cause and his trust of, and patience with, Dewey’s plodding campaign.

  Carnegie’s endorsement and dollars were a huge boost for the members of the Board. Spelling reform had now reached the upper echelons of academia and the private sector, and it was about to do the same in government. In August 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the federal printing office to use three hundred novel spellings, as prescribed by the Simplified Spelling Board. Dasht (from dashed), deposit (from deposite), good-by (from goodbye, not goodbye), instil (from instill), prest (from pressed), surprize (from surprise), thorofare (from thoroughfare), and vizor (from visor). A few months earlier, Roosevelt had written Columbia professor and Board member, James Brander Matthews, to let him know that the president’s personal secretary, William Loeb, “himself an advanced spelling reformer, will hereafter see that the President, in his correspondence, spells the way you say he ought to!”26

  Roosevelt himself wasn’t much of a speller, and the arguments set forth by Dewey and his crew resonated with the president’s idea of
common sense. Advocates of orthographic reform had pointed out, rather shrewdly, that qualified applicants to the federal office of the Civil Service Commission had been rejected because of spelling errors. Roosevelt had served in the Commission, and the Simplifiers may have been playing to his interests.27 Roosevelt also fraternized with some of the key players, including Matthews, whom he had invited to the White House, and Carnegie, who had once called Roosevelt a “prince in the republic of letters.”*28

  After the presidential edict, the Associated Press reported on August 28 that “an official list of the 300 reformed words reached the executive office yesterday,” and that “a meeting called by Public Printer [Charles] Stillings, of all the chief clerks of the various departments, and a committee was appointed to formulate rules for carrying out this order.”29 The president’s letter to Stillings enclosed the circular published by the Simplified Spelling Board, more copies of which, Roosevelt informed Stillings, “can be obtained free from the Board at No. 1 Madison Avenue, New York City.”30 Dewey, back in the office with his typewriter and stacks of flyers, must have been doing cartwheels.

  Roosevelt didn’t think the spelling measure was “anything very great at all.” He saw it as a modest and logical first step toward making “our spelling a little less foolish and fantastic.”31 Just as fysshe and publick were now archaic constructions, so too should night and thorough be turned into nite and thoro. “There is not the slightest intention to do anything revolutionary or initiate any far-reaching policy,” Roosevelt said. Many of the three hundred spellings were already part of everyday usage. Today about half of them are (for example, catalog, caliber, gelatin, and rancor, formerly catalogue, calibre, gelatine, and rancour), but these changes were organic. “The purpose is simply for the Government, instead of lagging behind popular sentiment, to advocate abreast of it and at the same time abreast of the views of the ablest and most practical educators of our time as well as the most profound scholars.”

  The press had an absolute field day with the president’s order. The New York Times vowed to correct Roosevelt’s “freak” spellings as if they were typos. The Baltimore Sun asked if the president would now spell his name Rusevelt, or whether he’d “get down to the fact and spell it ‘butt-in-sky.’” The Evening Post presciently stated: “This is 2 mutch.”32 A century later, President George W. Bush was hit with a similar barrage for gaffes—sorry, alternative pronunciations—like subliminimal and nucular, but at least Bush wasn’t ordering all members of the executive branch to adopt his unusual pronunciations. (Nucular, by the way, was added to the OED in 2003.)

  But the British press made the American media response look friendly by comparison. An August 25, 1906, article tagged as a “Special Cable to the New York Sun and Buffalo Courier,” reported that the London newspapers were calling Roosevelt an anarchist. “They do not go quite so far as to suggest lynching, yet it is clear that some of the leaders [headlines] in the evening papers were written while steam poured from the collars of the enraged editors.” Editors at the Evening Standard wrote: “[H]ow dare this Roosevelt fellow…dictate to us how to spell a language which is ours while America is still a savage and undiscovered country…Our language is our own and we shall write it as is proper.” Other articles railed against “barbarisms” like thru and called the president’s action “Yanky Panky.” The Globe posited that Roosevelt, like William the Conqueror, will find “it is easier to subdue a people than a language.” After conceding that Walt Whitman wrote something that could fairly be called poetry, The Globe editors pointed out “that in literature the United States still remains a province of England.”33 Mr. President, get your damn hands off our language.

  Members of the other branches of government were likewise less than pleased with the commander in chief. Despite the fact that Supreme Court Justice David J. Brewer was a member of the Simplified Spelling Board, the high court ignored the new spellings as they applied to any of its publications.34 When Congress returned to session after the summer break, opposition was swift. The House ordered an inquiry into the president’s action, and passed a resolution directing the public printer to ignore Roosevelt’s three hundred spellings and “observe and adhere to the standard of orthography prescribed in generally accepted dictionaries of the English language.”35 In December, when it seemed that the president’s orthography was headed for debate on the Senate floor, where it, and Roosevelt, would surely be burned, the president rescinded the order. One December 13 newspaper headline read: “Old-Fashioned Words Are to Prevail.”

  Historians and biographers have, understandably, dismissed Roosevelt’s foray into spelling reform as a wacky pet project. Yet in light of the firestorm of opposition from London and accusations at home of czarlike tendencies, the printing order may have hurt Roosevelt’s reputation more than you might think. “President Roosevelt’s spelling order has done him more harm than perhaps any other act of his since he became President,” wrote a New York Times correspondent in London.36 The episode was a humorous one, yes. But it prompted more than lighthearted editorials. After all, this was a president who would famously say: “I don’t think that any harm comes from the concentration of powers in one man’s hands.” Congress viewed the spelling edict as an example of precisely this kind of “energetic use of the executive power.”37 The speed at which the public and other branches of government moved to rein him in and reassert the constitutionally designated boundaries of his, and indeed the US government’s, authority, further illustrated just how upset people were.

  To his credit, Roosevelt was at least aware of his habit of stepping over the line. “…[A] President,” he wrote to a friend in 1907, “ought not to go into anything outside of his work as President. But it is rather a hard proposition to live up to.”38 Then again, his international reputation couldn’t have been too tarnished. A few months later, Roosevelt became the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, for his role in brokering an end to the Russo-Japanese War.

  “IT IS HARD to say which is more remarkable,” writes author Bill Bryson, “the number of influential people who became interested in spelling reform or the little effect they had on it.” At no time in history is this observation more salient than during the early years of the twentieth century, and especially during the Roosevelt administration. If Dewey’s office on Madison Avenue wasn’t outright buzzing, it was certainly more active than it ever had been or would be again. The president, a Supreme Court justice, the United States Commissioner of Education, Mark Twain, a group called the National Education Association,39 OED founding editor Murray, dozens of top academics, institutions, printers, and journalists, and Andrew Carnegie were all on board. Simplified spelling was threatening to be the next big thing. So what went wrong?

  The first answer is the one that jumps to mind for many people when they first hear about spelling reform: It’s unrealistic. I’m not talking about a three hundred–word list of tweaked words, half of which are spellings that have naturally been making their way into regular use. I’m talking about simplified spelling in the thousands-of-words sense, the way people like Hart, Webster (initially), and Dewey envisioned. It’s unrealistic because of the inevitable confusion it would trigger; the impracticality of remaking the alphabet, if that’s your chosen tactic; the impossibility of recasting English words to read phonetically no matter the accent; the costs of changing printing infrastructure; the hazard of a comprehension gap between present and past orthography; and the perpetual infighting among the revolutionaries themselves as to the nuts and bolts of reform. “There’s just no easy fix,” Crystal once told me. “Not for a spelling system that was six hundred years in the making.”

  In a strange twist, the reform effort may also have been hurt by the endorsement of such prominent figures. John Gable, executive director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association, speculates that Roosevelt’s connection with spelling reform was actually counterproductive to the cause. “All of a sudden it became about Roosevelt and his egotism�
��that he could think he could rewrite the English language.” Roosevelt was such an irresistible target for ridicule through cartoons and editorials, that spelling reform became “a laughing stock in a way it might not have been.”40 The writer H. L. Mencken noted that “the buffoonery characteristically thrown about the matter by Roosevelt, served only to raise up enemies.”41 In a similar vein, the very nature of public interest in, and scrutiny of, rich and powerful people made Carnegie’s association with spelling reform suspicious, as if the innocuous subject of orthography was linked to some shady corporate agenda.42

  Another setback was the decision to hold the annual Board meetings at New York’s prestigious Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Dewey and company constantly struggled to gain credibility and deflect accusations that spelling reform was little more than a frivolous form of gentlemen’s recreation. It’s perplexing, then, that the Board paid for members from out of town to stay at the Waldorf, with their families, and hosted a lavish banquet with custom-made menus.

  That’s not to say the meetings were all truffles and trifles. On the agenda for the 1913 gathering were a selection of papers including: “The Use of S and Z for their Respectiv Sounds in all Cases,” presented by Professor Oliver F. Emerson of Western Reserve, and “Simplification of Spelling in Ancient Times, or the Origin of the Greek Alfabet,” presented by Professor George Hempl of Stanford. But by and large the Waldorf meetings epitomized a campaign that, in the eyes of more and more people, was a waste of time and energy.

  Still, imagine what might have happened if Carnegie, so taken with spelling reform, had augmented his commitment to the tune of a few more zeros. He had signed on, after all, because he believed in education—the same reason that led him to the cause of public libraries. It’s not outlandish to think that a certain action here or conversation there might have led the brash capitalist to conclude that a changed spelling system was the key to literacy and education.