DISCLAIMER: All apparent misspellings in this blog are in fact typos, or a sign that the language is evolving before your very eyes.
David Wolman, author of Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled History of English Spelling, is about to speak to the best audience he may ever encounter: 200 word nerds, licensed to eat, shoot and leave. We are the kind of people who aced every grade school spelling test and now take Sharpies to well-intentioned but orthographically challenged signage. It is red ink that pulses through our veins.
Or so you might think. As it turns out, conference co-chair Matt Jennings confesses himself a bad speller, a revelation that just goes to show how far Spellcheck can take a young man and his dreams – to wit, to the Middlebury editorship and the chance to spend three blue-blazered days in the basement ballroom of the Grand Hyatt, Stockton St.
As it also turns out, Wolman himself cannot spell, a handicap that has not prevented his work from appearing in Newsweek, Wired, New Scientist and, now, at the Editors' Forum 2009.
On apparently safe terrain in front of “an incredibly well-read audience of people who take correct usage very seriously,” Wolman’s only concern this morning is what will happen if he starts to sound a little too permissive about language or alternative punctuation, or even says something positive about text messaging or Blackberry Dude (folk hero of Gerry Marzorati’s presentation, earlier at the EF).
***
The genesis of Righting the Mother Tongue, Wolman tell us, was his introduction to some rather radical language enthusiasts and an increasing awareness that, if you put the English spelling code under the microscope and spend some time staring at it, you find its DNA is remarkably convoluted.
Wolman says, “Encoded in the genome of English spelling are some wonderful stories … that hit on eternal themes. There are stories about war, obsession, immigration. Imperialism, technology. And, of course, history and literature.
“There are stories about authoritarianism vs. democracy. What is right what is wrong, and says who – or is it whom, and does it really matter?
“Stories about orthography are stories about change. We can follow that change through history. How did the words we use acquire their current form, and who are the agents of change?”
English has always been a mutt, Wolman explains. It is the product of languages mixing, meddling, mutating, and also borrowing from the Celtic and the Latin. English has gone out into the world by many agencies: on the ships of the British Empire and, more recently, via the Internet and text-messaging.
“Along the way, English has been just vacuuming up words from all over the globe. When new words come into the lexicon, there are no customs agents at the borders checking papers.”
In almost all languages, Wolman says, there is a direct correlation between letters on the page and the sound they make. Some words in English are like that. The trouble is that it also has a truckload of other words that aren’t. They come with silent letters, accents imported with foreign words and exceptions to every rule you care to mention.
Advocates for spelling reform argue for a simplification of the code. They say children are spending too much time in school learning spelling. The lack of logic makes written English particularly tough for non-native speakers, they reason. And – this is Wolman’s favorite among their rationales – it necessitates our spending too much money on copyeditors.
Wolman’s initial goal for Righting the Mother Tongue was to tell the stories of historic spelling reform advocates like George Bernard Shaw, Andrew Carnegie and Melvil (né Melville) Dewey (he of the Dewey decimal system, who at one point helpfully changed his last name to Dui).
It turns out that the spelling reform movement is still alive – sort of. Wolman learned about a group called the Simplified Spelling Society. Modern-day torchbearers of this movement, they gather every year to demonstrate outside the Washington, D.C., hotel that hosts the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Two years ago, Wolman tells us, he paid his $35 membership fee and flew to D.C. to see what life was like at the frontline of spelling reform. His research led to chapter 8, “Spellraisers,” from which he draws his reading today.
It turns out, protesting spelling provokes strong feelings on both sides of the picket line. The crusaders storming the walls of this new Jerusalem have flown in from California, Colorado and Iowa, not to mention Canada, England and even New Zealand.
Picket signs bear punning slogans: “Let’s end the i in Friend,” “Let’s take the sting out of spelling” (with picture of bee – geddit?). Others represent the hardline: “Spelling is the bullet hole and illitracy is the exit wound.”
Passersby heckle the would-be reformers: “Go to a library, it’s free.” “If you can’t learn to read in America, you can’t learn to read anywhere.” A British television producer says “Yeah. Good idea. Let’s just make spelling easier for the stupid people.”
But the truly irate responses came from Bee parents. Wolman reads:
“We were stationed directly outside the hotel where these families were having one of their most exciting and memorable weekends ever. The Simplified Spelling Societies members kept insisting that this was not a protest, that they are fans of the Bee, and that they think the young spelling stars are wonderful. But this attempt at diplomacy fell on deaf ears. Carrying signs with half-cheeky, half-argumentative slogans, we looked like Scrooges, raining on a beloved American parade and pooh-poohing the achievements of talented children. Not exactly a stellar PR strategy.”
***
Wolman fields a few mildly subversive questions from the floor – “Why ‘butterfly’?” “Do we need the apostrophe?” – before showing his true colors. For the record, he declares himself no spelling maverick: “ When I hear ‘irregardless’ my skin crawls, and when I hear people say someone ‘invited Michelle and I’ to the White House, I cringe. But linguists say there’s really nothing wrong with that. Grade school teachers say, well, you can’t say invited I to the White House, can you? Well true – but I didn’t say that.
“Why is correct spelling or proper use of apostrophe associated with virtuous behavior? This is really what I wanted to explore. It’s really just a lot of memorization.”
Wolman recounts the day he spent in a lab being tested to see if he was, in fact, a compensated dyslexic. He was hooked up to machines that could see what was going on in his brain as he struggled to spell words like dyslexia. “Turns out I’m not, so I don’t have a diagnosis to explain my condition.”
Spelling is really a question of accessing a giant Rolodex in your brain, Wolman says. Some people find it easier to access that system than others. Even though he’s not dyslexic, he doesn’t have the best wiring for spelling. (Orthography is not the earliest challenge Wolman has addressed in hard covers. His first book was about the difficulties faced by lefties in a right-handed world.)
As a writer, pitching stories to editors, all this is ever on his mind. He believes paying attention to spelling and grammar is a way to put care and thought into a letter. “If someone is careless but the pitch is terrific, then what?”
A friend told him she broke up with a guy after he sent her one too many e-mails with spelling mistakes in. Using down-and-dirty media, how much room will there be for this kind of prejudice, Wolman wonders.
Next question: if we simplified the spelling code, what would happen to etymology?
“One of the wholesale travesties of reforming the whole system would be that we would lose etymology. But that’s only reason #6 why the system wouldn’t work. Reason #1 is, what about pronunciation? If we go by pronunciation, whose pronunciation?”
Another sticking point is our alphabet. We have only 26 letters to represent 44 sounds. “These people have a long way to go." Wolman returns to the D.C. picketers. “One of the fun things about them is, they can’t agree on what the fix is. There was debate about whether they should use simplified spelling on picket signs. The answer was, no, because we want people to be able to read them. And, because no-one could agree on what the simplified spelling should be.”
Do they have a plan? “They sort of envision a language academy like the French have. This is a notion that English has always resisted. We don’t have a group of 40 men sitting around a table deciding how English should be used.
“Maybe the simplified spelling people have a quiet dream that they will be at the table.”
In fact, simplified spelling is happening anyway, without intervention from the SSS. “In the digital age, people are voting with their fingertips. It doesn’t mean rhubarb will lose its h tomorrow, but maybe in 30 years. There is a real power-to-the-people element to it.”
Case in point: Enough people go looking for information on the word Dalmation that Google will take them to the information they need without asking “Did you mean Dalmatian?” Google is saying, who are we to tell you how to spell Dalmatian?
The simplified spelling folk don’t get a seat at the table but the spelling they have dreamed of is becoming real, Wolman says. Maybe they can derive some satisfaction from the change that is happening.
And he tells us, “As editors, you are gatekeepers for language change, the more so because you are working with students who are accelerating language change, with professors who are exploring new processes, using new terminology. You get to code tomorrow’s English in your magazines, which is really neat.”
That it is.
—Susan Allen
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