Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling
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* Samuel Johnson’s method for compiling the dictionary was essentially the same, but he didn’t solicit outside help the way Murray did.
* Webster pulled generously from Johnson’s dictionary. As H. L. Mencken put it, Webster was “sufficiently convinced of its merits to imitate it, even to the extent of lifting whole passages.”
* During one meeting, Harvard philology professor and Dante expert, Charles Hall Grandgent, who referred to himself as a “frothy anarchist,” proclaimed that “no Harvard student ever misspells a word.” (Dewey Archive, Box 86, pp. 42 and 55 of 1912 SSB meeting minutes)
* To the converted, he had no problem penning sentences like this one, from June of 1914: “There ar so fu ov us that ar foloin this thin up thoroli that we must kip in close tuch.” How Dewey couldn’t see the confusion caused by foloin and sirloin, as in steak, is beyond me. (Dewey Archive, Box 39, June 19 letter to Mr. N. J. Werner)
* Roosevelt may have been exposed to the idea of updating English orthography much earlier in his life. As a student at Harvard in the 1880s, he had a class with the famed psychologist and philosopher, William James. Well before the heyday of the Simplified Spelling Board, James had written to a friend, “Isn’t it abominable that everybody is expected to spell the same way? Let us get a dozen influential persons, each to spell after his own fashion and so break up this tyranny.”
* Many words in the lexicon have been influenced by this sort of switcheroo, such as the Old English bridd, which became bird, and thyrl, which became thrill.
* Google keeps logs of what searchers are looking for, and comparing the English and Italian versions of search histories, a company programmer told me that while misspelled search terms in Italian are usually caused by typos, misspelled English searches are sometimes caused by typos, of course, but are sometimes the result of someone’s difficulty with irregular spellings.
† Patterns of functions may be similar, but a 2008 study by researchers in Hong Kong found that the brains of dyslexic children in Chinese-versus English-speaking cultures may be structurally different.