33. Spelling (part-5)

As time went on, many English speakers grew to feel the same way. By the end

of the eighteenth century people were beginning to call for a more orderly and

reliable system of spelling. Benjamin Franklin spoke for many when he

complained that if spelling were not reformed "our words will gradually cease to

express Sounds, they will only stand for things, as the written words do in the

Chinese Language.

In 1768, he published A Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of

Spelling, but since this required the creation of six additional letters, it can

hardly be called a simplification.

People began to feel passionate about it. Noah Webster not only pushed for

simplified spelling, but lobbied Congress to make it a legal requirement—

turning America into the only country in history where deviant spelling would be

a punishable offense.

Another enthusiast for simplified spelling was Mark Twain, who was troubled

not so much by the irregularity of our words as by the labor involved in

scribbling them. He became enamored of a "phonographic alphabet" devised by

Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand (which Pitman called Stenographic

Soundhand, thus proving once again that inventors are generally hopeless at

naming their inventions. "To write the word 'laugh,' " Twain noted in A

Simplified Alphabet, "the pen has to make fourteen strokes. To write laff,' the

pen has to make the same number of strokes—no labor is saved to the penman."

But to write the same word with the phonographic alphabet, Twain went on, the

pen had to make just three strokes.

To the untrained eye Pitman's phonographic alphabet looks rather like a cross

between Arabic and the trail of a sidewinder snake, and of course it never caught

on.

But that isn't to say that the movement flagged. Indeed, it gathered pace until by

late in the century it seemed as if every eminent person on both sides of the

Atlantic—including Darwin, Tennyson, Arthur Conan Doyle, James A. H.

Murray (the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary), and of course Twain

—was pushing for spelling reform. It is hard to say which is the more

remarkable, the number of influential people who became interested in spelling

reform or the little effect they had on it.Spelling reform associations began to pop up all over. In 1876, the newly formed American Philological Association called for the urgent" adoption of eleven new spellings—lie, tho, thru, wisht, catalog, definit, Bard, giv, hay, infinit, and ar—

though how they arrived at those particular eleven, and what cataclysm they

feared would arise if they weren't adopted, is unknown. In this same year,

doubtless inspired by America's centennial celebrations, the Spelling Reform

Association was formed, and three years later a British version followed.

In 1906, the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie gave $250,000, a whopping sum, to

help establish the Simplified Spelling Board.

One of the board's first acts was to issue a list of 300 words commonly spelled in

two ways—ax and axe, judgement and judgment, and so on—and to give

endorsement to the simpler of the two. By this means, and with the support of

other influential bodies such as the National Education Association, it helped to

gain acceptance for the American spellings of catalog, demagog, and program

and very nearly, according to H. L. Mencken succeeded in getting

tho established. President Theodore Roosevelt was so taken with these easier

spellings that he ordered their adoption by the Government Printing Office in all

federal documents. For a time simplified spelling seemed to be on its way.

But then, as so often happens, the Simplified Spelling Board became altogether

carried away with its success and began to press for more ambitious—some

would say more ridiculous—changes. It called for such spellings as tuf, def,

troble (for trouble), yu (for you), filosofy, and several dozen others just as eye-

rattling. It encountered a wall of resistance. Suddenly simplified spelling went

out of fashion, a process facilitated by the eruption of World War I and the death

of its wealthiest benefactor, Andrew Carnegie. Its friends abandoned it, and the

Simplified Spelling Board began a long slide into obscurity and eventual death.

Yet the movement lived fitfully on, most notably in the hands of George Bernard

Shaw who wrote archly: "An intelligent child who is bidden to spell debt, and

very properly spells it d-e-t, is caned for not spelling it with a b because Julius

Caesar spelled it with a b.-

Shaw used a private shorthand in his own writing and insisted upon certain

mostly small simplifications in the published texts of his own plays—turning

can't, won't, and haven't into cant, wont, and haunt, for example. At his death in1950, he left the bulk of his estate to promote spelling reform. As it happened,

death duties ate up almost everything, and the whole business would likely have

been forgotten except that his play Pygmalion was transformed into the smash

hit My Fair Lady and suddenly royalties poured in. But, as you won't have failed

to notice, this did not lead to any lasting change in the way the world spells

English.

One of the last-gasp holdouts against old-fashioned spellings was Colonel

Robert R. McCormick (1880-1955), editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune,

who for two generations insisted on such spellings as nite for night, frate for

freight, iland for island, cigaret for cigarette, and some 300 others—though

never all at once. After his death most of the more jarring spellings were quietly

dropped.

Oddly, McCormick never called for two of the most common shortenings, tho

and thru. He just didn't like them, which of course is all the reason that is

necessary when it's your newspaper.

So while spelling reform has exercised some of our finest minds for nearly two

centuries, the changes attributable to these efforts have generally been few and

frequently short-lived. The one notable exception is Noah Webster (about whom

more in a later chapter), though even his changes were not nearly as far-ranging

as he dreamed.

What is less often noticed is that spelling reform has been quietly going on for

centuries, in a small but not insignificant way, and without the benefit of any

outside agencies. In that splendidly random way that characterizes most facets of

English development, it just happened. Many words have shed a pointless final

e-deposite, fossile, and secretariate, for instance. Musick and physick similarly

gave up their needless k's. The tendency continues today with simplified

spellings like catalog, dialog, and omelet gradually easing out the old spellings

of catalogue, dialogue, and omelette, at least in America. Two hundred years ago

there were scores of words that could be spelled in two or more ways, but today

the list has shrunk to a handful—ax/axe, gray/grey, inquire/enquire, and (outside

North America) jail/gaol—but even here there is a clear tendency in every

English-speaking country to favor one form or the other, to move towards

regularity.