I used to explain, apologetically, that my spelling-whiz younger sister had inherited the family “spelling genes.” By the time I made it to college I was more assertive. I’d point out that President Andrew Jackson and F. Scott Fitzgerald were spelling-impaired. (At least one instructor responded that he’d never cared for Fitzgerald’s prose style.) Nowadays my preferred answer to complaints is that any lout with a spell-check can get the letter-arrangement right. What counts is whether one can group the words well enough to make the check worthwhile. This argument has won a few debates, but plenty of folks aren’t yet convinced.
A combination of genetic and environmental factors accounts for my difficulties. I’ve a natural tendency to try to spell words the way they sound. And I was born among a people who speak English, a notoriously nonphonetic tongue. Having done some research on who’s to blame for this, I find the problems started early. The English alphabet has been understaffed since the Anglo-Saxon period: 26 letters represent 40 phonemes.
After the Norman conquests, French scribes got hold of the language and added extra Gs (thus spellings like Thought, Enough and Neighbor.) English was one of the earliest languages to be mechanically printed, and changes in writing have always lagged behind changes in pronunciation.
As if that weren’t enough, there’s the English-speaker’s historical willingness to adopt foreign terms, complete with their different rules of spelling. This has greatly contributed to the language’s power of expression. It has also saddled us with such phonetic monstrosities as “psyche” and “rendezvous.”
Most of my spelling flubs can be traced to three idiosyncrasies of English. The problem of “Double Letters–Or Not?” is tricky since a word with a missing letter (or an extra one) doesn’t always look wrong. Is it iritate or irritate? Dimension or dimmension? Shimer or shimmer? Interchangeable consonants are also baffling, particularly “S” and “C” (response/responce?) and “S” and “Z” (advertize/advertise?). But these are the minor problems. I can usually get them correct by seeing the words often enough.
My real bugbear is vowels. The “Great Vowel Shift” of the 15th century has a lot to answer for. In what other tongue would “fur,” “fer,” and “fir” all spell the same sound? Why should moving the “E” change the sound of the “G” in Angel and Angle? What about that “Silent E” that’s supposed to be dropped, or not, when a suffix is added? We even have words with dual sounds for vowels: “wind,” “lead,” “read,” “bow,” “wound,” “tear,” “dove.” You have to see the context to know the meaning. Don’t get me started on all those exceptions to the “I before E except after C” rule. Why do we need to put vowels together anyway, when there is such a range of possible pronunciations?
I’m not the first to protest the madness. In the late 1400s, printer-publisher William Caxton wrestled with translating a book from the French into English. He was afraid that “common people” would not be able to understand it. His attempts at spelling uniformity were stymied by the difficulty of accommodating his prospective readers’ various dialects. Three centuries later, Jonathan Swift cited this problem as an argument against “A foolish Opinion, advanced of late Years, that we ought to spell exactly as we speak . . . a thing we should never see an end of.”
Luckily for later generations, Benjamin Franklin was of that “foolish Opinion.” In 1768, in an essay entitled “A Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling,” he proposed, among other things, getting rid of silent letters. While most of Franklin’s plan was generally ignored, lexicographer Noah Webster adopted part of it in his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language. The impact of Webster’s work on American spelling is obvious to any reader of prerevolutionary literature–or of “Olde Antique Shoppe” shingles.
There’s been more progress toward phoneticism in recent years. On highway signs, due to spatial limitations, “thru” and “nite” have become acceptable alternate spellings. “Tho” is turning up in customer-relations newsletters. I continue to hope “skool” and “enuf " may gain ground in my lifetime. I guess we can’t do much about “right”; its phonetic spelling “rite” already has a separate definition. Something similar has happened to “light.” It would be better spelled “lite,” except the latter now means “low-calorie, or insubstantial.” (Well, that’s the process of linguistic enrichment.) And we don’t have to fix everything: “tion” may be an absurd way to represent “shun,” but it is consistent.
Perhaps it’s time for me and my fellow bad spellers to take the offensive. We can start by devising a new term for ourselves, preferably polysyllabic–and cultivate a habit of angrily chewing out anyone who refers to us by the degrading phrase, Bad Speller. Our platform will be that phonetic spelling is a more rational and humane system than the stagnating quagmire of “correct spelling.”
Having thus gained a voice, we can allow reason to the fore, and propose reforms. Imperfect spelling shall no longer be viewed as miscreant behavior, nor indicative of low IQ. There shall be higher tolerance for letting phonetically correct spellings creep into the language. Literary institutions should be ready to accept spelling evolution as a historically verifiable fact.
Finally, Mark Twain shall be canonized as the Patron Saint of Phonetic Letterers. He is credited with the retort that should be the rallying cry of our movement: “I don’t give a damn for a man that can spell a word only one way.”
