| Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993. |
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| SPELLING 2, MISSPELLING, AND SPELLING REFORM |
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Correct spelling is a must for Americans; failure to spell words according to the conventions recorded in dictionaries is perhaps as powerful a shibboleth as Americans use on each other. As Thorstein Veblen (1899) pointed out:| | English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection. |
| Therefore it is the first and readiest test of reputability in learning, and conformity to its ritual is indispensable to a blameless scholastic life. |
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| Almost none of us is without blemish in this matter, but fortunately poor spelling is not usually a clear indication of ethical flaws or bad work habits, any more than it is of stupidity. Nevertheless, considering the large numbers of us who spell indifferently, we are merciless in correcting others’ misspellings, as though they proved the culprit indeed unethical, lazy, or stupid. | 2 |
| The main requirements for being an accurate speller are a combination of innate qualities and experience. If your visual imagination is good, you can envision the image of the word correctly spelled and then match that image when you write. If your imagination is not good, or if your experience includes too much exposure to a misspelled word, you will be helpless without a dictionary, brute memorization, or rhymes and other mnemonic devices. | 3 |
| It has long been customary to fault the English language spelling system for being a hodgepodge of contradictory rules, silent letters, and unstressed vowels variously represented. It does indeed present those difficulties, but actually, considering its history and its remarkably cosmopolitan vocabulary (with loan words from nearly every language in the world), today’s English is quite reasonably spelled. The chief problem is one faced by every natural language: it changes its words, their meanings, and their pronunciations over time, as people use the language, resulting in more than one spelling for a given sound and more than one sound for a given spelling. But there are generalizations that explain some problems reasonably well: see, for example, CONSONANTS (2) and SPELLING OF -ING AND -ED FORMS OF VERBS ENDING IN -IC, -AC. It’s not a hodgepodge; it’s a system, and the system works well. | 4 |
| Spelling reformers have long been unhappy over the inexact match between some of our English speech sounds and our alphabet, and every generation brings proposals for new, “improved” alphabets or parts of alphabets. But none of these alphabets can succeed, for at least two reasons: because English pronunciation keeps changing and varying (see CHANGE AND VARIATION IN LANGUAGE), to make our spelling accurately reflect its sounds would mean respelling the language every decade or two to reflect change, and also respelling it to reflect dialectal variation in various parts of the country and world. And if we respelled it that often, we would have to give up our fixed images of many, many words: we would all have several images of some words, and we would be at sea. Because so much of what we read we need only to skim, we would be horribly handicapped by not being able to read silently. Wholesale spelling reform would also cost us our investment in the conventions of English spelling—those fixed mental images of certain words to which we refer almost unconsciously as we write would be as useless as all the rules hammered into us in grammar school. To be obliged to learn a new system or perhaps a revision of the old every decade or so would be unthinkable. Even more unthinkable would be the cost of respelling all the old books in our libraries. If we respelled everything three or four times a century to reflect our changes in pronunciation, Charles Dickens’s language would soon look as odd to us as Chaucer’s does today. So spelling reform is piecemeal at best; a variant spelling here and there will gradually replace another, and it all happens a word or two at a time. | 5 |
| English spelling began to freeze during the Renaissance, soon after printing with movable type began to replace the handcopying of manuscripts. By Thomas Jefferson’s time, most major spelling variations had disappeared. There were still a few eighteenth-century -ick spellings that Webster later reduced to -ic (musick became music), but few spellings in the Declaration of Independence would require a modern proofreader’s red pencil. Even so British and American spelling still differ in a fair number of details (see SPELLING [1]), such as labor/labour and curb/kerb, and since we read English from all over the globe these days, our dictionaries frequently record variant spellings of that sort. And some variants exist simply because the conventional spellings of certain words have not quite settled down yet: a few years ago programming and programmers posed a problem (should they be programing and programers?), and if you consult a good recent dictionary, you will find that both spellings of each are acceptable at present: these spellings are still in divided usage. | 6 |
| Given the huge numbers of foreign words this language has borrowed over the centuries, it is not at all remarkable that their English spellings reflect the cosmopolitan character of their sources. A few relatively trivial inconveniences in spelling in return for the unparalleled richness of our augmented lexicon is a great bargain. | 7 |
| Some have thought that with the electronic spelling checkers available on our word processors, spelling errors will be no more. Alas, some spelling errors may easily be rooted out by this means, but others (the language is full of homophones like to, two, and too, all good words but variously distributed) will not yield quite so easily. So, in view of the unfair but constant use of spelling as shibboleth, you must take steps to protect yourself. Consult dictionaries, stop grousing, and be grateful that yours is the richest, most varied language in the world. | 8 |
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| | | The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. Copyright © 1993 Columbia University Press. |
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