Spellbound
North of 50 - October “Fair Comment” column
Don Sawyer
Last month I was on Charles Adler’s national call-in radio program, Adler On-Line as an “education specialist.” The topic? Spelling reform.
Not top on your “to be concerned about” list? Perhaps not, but the show lit up the phone banks like a Christmas tree. Clearly we had hit a nerve. People of all ages who had been bludgeoned by red-circled spelling mistakes, bored senseless by weekly spelling tests on words they didn’t know or use, made to feel dumb because they couldn’t remember if you spelled “consensus” with a second “c” or if “weird” really was “i before e except after c” called in droves.
What made the show particularly provocative was that the other guest was none other than Dr. John Wells, Professor of Phonetics at University College London (England) and president of the British Spelling Society. A rather retiring academic, Prof. Wells has gained notoriety lately for advocating the “freeing up” of spelling rules. What that means exactly seems a bit fuzzy, but he does point to text messaging and internet chat rooms as an indication of “the way forward for English.”
I was, I think, cast as the counter voice, the advocate of staunch “stick to your guns” spelling orthodoxy. But the truth is, I have some sympathy for Prof. Wells’ position. Some, but not a lot.
Bemoaning the irrationality of English spelling is not new. In the 1200’s, a monk name only Orm called for a standardized, phonetic English spelling system. Of the nearly 18,000 words used in Shakespeare’s plays, an astonishing 10% had never been used before. Spelling was still pretty fast and loose in those days. But as conventions hardened, the hodgepodge of borrowed, local dialect and multiple-rooted words that make up the English language meant that nearly 50% of the 615,000 words appearing in the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary language were not fully phonetic.
The American Philological Society was founded in 1869 largely to get us to spell through as thru, and though as tho. The Simplified Spelling Board, established in 1906, was more ambitious, aggressively pushing a list of 300 simplified spellings. (It almost worked, too. President Theodore Roosevelt adopted the system and ordered all government publications to use the new system before Congress angrily revoked the order.) Great spelling reformers such as George Bernard Shaw (who even held a contest for an improved spelling system) and Mark Twain failed miserably.
So now its Professor Wells turn the plate. Quite correctly, Dr. Wells points out that language, and even spelling, are living systems that change all of the time. They are, ultimately, simply codes used for communicating ideas and information. So, if the computer generation wants to write Shakespeare’s line “I never knew such a young body with such an old head” as “i nvr knw so yung a bod W so old a hed,” what’s the problem?
Several. First, while language evolves, it normally does so over decades, even centuries. That is why you can read Boswell’s Life of Johnson, published in the 18th century, with ease. Why you can enjoy Shakespeare’s plays, despite their being written 400 years ago. What we are seeing with the advent of text messaging and other shorthands is not an evolution but the emergence of a new written English. Since this new language is largely unintelligible to those outside its dialectical boundaries, it ceases to be a communication tool except between initiates. This new language excludes elders and anyone else not familiar with the “code.”
McLuhan commented that we always look at our society through a rear view mirror. What are the effects of this emerging dialect? For one, it has the potential of reinforcing the already stifling (for both sides) “youth culture,” further disconnecting our young people from the adult world. Like all dialects, it reinforces a tribal mentality, a “them and us” attitude.
Perhaps more importantly, at the heart of good written and spoken communication is the ability to elaborate our ideas and thoughts sufficiently so others can fully understand the image we have in or heads, to fully grasp the concepts we wish to convey. The capacity to understand who your audience is and use vocabulary (and spelling conventions) appropriate to their backgrounds and skill levels requires sensitivity, flexibility, empathy and a whole lot of words. That inability to elaborate, previously found mainly in small, isolated communities, has been found to be one of the biggest obstacle to effective writing.
Some research indicates that students entering high school may have as little as half the vocabulary as those a generation ago. Moreover, researchers are suggesting the very real possibility that simplifying language to such an extent literally limits young people’s ability to generate – or comprehend – complex thoughts and idea.
While I sympathize with the ongoing struggle of students everywhere to master the beautiful monstrosity that is English, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
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