The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

8. Spelling

The mainland of Europe never produced an alphabet of its own. Our own alphabet has its roots in pictographs. Our letter A comes from the Semitic aleph, meaning “ox,” and originally was a rough depiction of an ox’s head. B comes from the Semitic bēth, meaning “house.” But the people of the Near East, unlike those of the Far East, made an important leap in thought of almost incalculable benefit to us. They began to use their pictographs to represent sounds rather than things. The Egyptian symbol for the word re began to stand not just for sun but for any syllable pronounced “ray.”

To appreciate the wonderfully simplifying beauty of this system you have only to look at the problems that bedevil the Chinese and Japanese languages. There are two ways of rendering speech into writing. One is with an alphabet, such as we have, or a pictographic-ideographic system, such as the Chinese use.

Chinese writing is immensely complicated. The basic unit of the Chinese written word is the radical. The radical for earth is and for small is . All words in Chinese are formed from these and 212 other radicals. Radicals can stand alone or be combined to form other words. Eye and water make teardrop. Mouth and bird make song. Two women means quarrel and three women means gossip.

Since every word requires its own symbol, Chinese script is immensely complicated. It possesses some 50,000 characters, of which about 4,000 are in common use. Chinese typewriters are enormous and most trained typists cannot manage more than about ten words a minute. But even the most complex Chinese typewriter can only manage a fraction of the characters available. If a standard Western typewriter keyboard were expanded to take in every Chinese ideograph it would have to be about fifteen feet long and five feet wide—about the size of two Ping-Pong tables pushed together.

Dictionaries, too, are something of a nightmare. Without an alphabet, how do you sensibly arrange the words? The answer is that in most dictionaries the language is divided into 214 arbitrary clusters based on their radicals, but even then you must hunt randomly through each section until you stumble across the spelling you seek.

The consequences of not having an alphabet are enormous. There can be no crossword puzzles, no games like Scrabble, no palindromes, no anagrams, no Morse code. In the age of telegraphy, to get around this last problem, the Chinese devised a system in which each word in the language was assigned a number. Person, for instance, was 0086. This process was equally cumbersome, but it did have the advantage that an American or Frenchman who didn’t know a word of Chinese could translate any telegram from China simply by looking in a book. To this day in China, and other countries such as Japan where the writing system is also ideographic, there is no logical system for organizing documents. Filing systems often exist only in people’s heads. If the secretary dies, the whole office can fall apart.

However, Chinese writing possesses one great advantage over other languages: It can be read everywhere. Chinese is not really a language at all, but more a family of loosely related dialects. A person from Fukien can no more understand the speech of the people of Shanghai than a Londoner can understand what people are saying in Warsaw or Stockholm. In some places one dialect is spoken over a very wide area, but in other parts of the country, particularly in the deep south, the dialects can change every two or three miles. Yet although the person from Fukien couldn’t talk to anyone from Canton, he could read their newspapers because the written language is the same everywhere. The ideographs are pronounced differently in different areas but read the same—rather in the way that 1, 2, 3 means the same to us as it does to a French person even though we see it as “one, two, three” while they see it as “un, deux, trois.”

An equally useful advantage of written Chinese is that people can read the literature of 2,500 years ago as easily as yesterday’s newspapers, even though the spoken language has changed beyond recognition. If Confucius were to come back to life today, no one apart from scholars would understand what he was saying, but if he scribbled a message people could read it as easily as they could a shopping list.

Even more complicated is Japanese, which is a blend of three systems: a pictographic system of 7,000 characters called kanji and two separate syllabic alphabets each consisting of 48 characters. One of these alphabets, katakana (sometimes shortened to kana), is used to render words and names (such as Dunkin’ Donuts and Egg McMuffin) that the ancient devisers of kanji failed to foresee. Since many of the kanji characters have several pronunciations and meanings—the word ka alone has 214 separate meanings—a second syllabic alphabet was devised. Called hiragana and written as small symbols above the main text, it tells the reader which of the many possible interpretations of the kanji characters is intended.

All this is so immensely complicated that until the mid-1980s, most Japanese had to learn English or some other Western language in order to use a personal computer. The Japanese have now managed to get around the pictographic problem by using a keyboard employing katakana syllables which are converted on the screen into kanji characters, rather as if we were to write twenty percent by striking three keys—“20,” “per,” and “cent”—and then seeing on the screen one symbol: “20%.” Despite this advance, the Japanese still suffer two considerable problems. First, they have no tradition of keyboard writing, so that typing is a bewildering new skill to many of them, and, second, each computer must be immensely more powerful than a Western model just to deal with the fact that it takes 7,000 symbols to write Japanese (against a hundred or so for most Western languages) and that whereas Western letters can be represented on computer screens by as few as 35 dots of light, Japanese characters can require up to 576 dots to be clearly distinguishable.

It is a disarming reflection of their determination and ingenuity that they have become such a technological powerhouse with such a patently inefficient system of orthography.

In comparison the Western way of writing begins to look admirably simple and well ordered. And yet in its way it is itself a pretty imperfect system for converting sounds into thoughts. English is particularly hit or miss. We have some forty sounds in English, but more than 200 ways of spelling them. We can render the sound “sh” in up to fourteen ways (shoe, sugar, passion, ambitious, ocean, champagne, etc.); we can spell “ō” in more than a dozen ways (go, beau, stow, sew, doe, though, escargot, etc.) and “ā” in a dozen more (hey, stay, make, maid, freight, great, etc.). If you count proper nouns, the word in English with the most varied spellings is air with a remarkable thirty-eight: Aire, ayr, heir, e’er, ere, and so on.

Spellings in English are so treacherous, and opportunities for flummoxing so abundant, that the authorities themselves sometimes stumble. The first printing of the second edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary had millennium spelled millenium in its definition of that word, while in the first edition of the American Heritage Dictionary you can find vichysoisse instead of vichyssoise. In The English Language [page 91], Robert Burchfield, called by William Safire the “world’s most influential lexicographer,” talks about grammatical prescriptivists who regard “innovation as dangerous or at any rate resistable.” It should be resistible. In The Story of Language, Mario Pei writes flectional on page 114 and flexional just four pages later. And in The Treasure of Our Tongue, Lincoln Barnett laments the decline of spelling by noting: “An English examination at New Jersey’s Fairleigh Dickinson University disclosed that less than one quarter of the freshmen class could spell professor correctly.” I wonder, for my part, how many of them could spell freshman class.

Just as a quick test, see if you can tell which of the following words are mispelled.

supercede

conceed

procede

idiosyncracy

concensus

accomodate

impressario

irresistable

rhythym

opthalmologist

diptheria

anamoly

afficianado

caesarian

grafitti

In fact, they all are. So was misspelled at the end of the preceeding paragraph. So was preceding just there. I’m sorry, I’ll stop. But I trust you get the point that English can be a maddeningly difficult language to spell correctly.

Some people contend that English orthography is not as bad as all that—that it even has some strengths. Simeon Potter believed that English spelling possessed three distinguishing features that offset its other shortcomings: The consonants are fairly regular in their pronunciation, the language is blessedly free of the diacritical marks that complicate other languages—the umlauts, cedillas, circumflexes, and so on—and, above all, English preserves the spelling of borrowed words, so that people of many nations “are immediately aware of the meanings of thousands of words which would be unrecognizable if written phonetically.” We might dare to quibble with the first of these observations. Potter evidently was not thinking of the c in bloc, race, and church or the s in house, houses, and mission, or the t in think, tinker, and mention, or the h in host, hour, thread, and cough, or the two g’s in garage and gauge, or indeed most of the other consonants when he praised their regularity of pronunciation. On the other hand, English does benefit from the absence of diacritical marks. These vary from language to language, but in some they play a crucial, and often confusing, role. In Hungarian, for instance, tőke means capital, but töke means testicles. Szár means stem, but take away the accent and it becomes the sort of word you say when you hit your thumb with a hammer. David Crystal in The English Language observes that there are only 400 or so irregular spellings in English (only?), and, rather more persuasively, notes that 84 percent of English spellings conform to a general pattern (e.g., purse/nurse/curse, patch/catch/latch) while only 3 percent of our words are spelled in a really unpredictable way.

A mere 3 percent of our words may be orthographically troublesome, but they include some doozies, as we used to say. Almost any argument in defense of English spelling begins to look a trifle flimsy when you consider such anomalies as colonel, a word that clearly contains no r and yet proceeds as if it did, or ache, bury, and pretty, all of which are pronounced in ways that pay the scantest regard to their spellings, or four and forty, one of which clearly has a u and the other of which just as clearly doesn’t. In fact, all the “four” words—four, fourth, fourteen, twenty-four, and so on—are spelled with a u until we get to forty when suddenly the u disappears. Why?

As with most things in life, there are any number of reasons for all of these. Sometimes our curious spellings are simply a matter of carelessness. That is why, for instance, abdomen has an e but abdominal doesn’t, why hearken has an e but hark doesn’t. Colonel is perhaps the classic example of this orthographic waywardness. The word comes from the old French coronelle, which the French adapted from the Italian colonello (from which we get colonnade). When the word first came into English in the mid-sixteenth century, it was spelled with an r, but gradually the Italian spelling and pronunciation began to challenge it. For a century or more both spellings and pronunciations were commonly used, until finally with inimitable illogic we settled on the French pronunciation and Italian spelling.

The matter of the vanishing u from forty is more problematic. Chaucer spelled it with a u, as indeed did most people until the end of the seventeenth century, and some for half a century or so after that. But then, as if by universal decree, it just quietly vanished. No one seems to have remarked on it at the time. Bernstein suggests [in Dos, Don’ts and Maybes of English Usage, page 87] that it may have reflected a slight change in pronunciation—to this day many people aspirate four and forty in slightly different ways—but this begs the question of why the pronunciation changed for the first word and not for the second. In any case, it would be most unusual for the spelling of a word to change to reflect such a minor adjustment of pronunciation.

Usually in English we strive to preserve the old spelling at almost any cost to logicality. Take ache. The spelling seems desperately inconsistent today, as indeed it is. Up until Shakespeare’s day, ache was pronounced aitch when it was a noun. As a verb, it was pronounced ake—but also, rather sensibly, was spelled ake. This tendency to fluctuate between “ch” and “k” sounds was once fairly common. It accounts for such pairs as speech/speak, stench/stink, and stitch/stick. But ache, for reasons that defy logic, adopted the verb pronunciation and the noun spelling.

English spelling has caused problems for about as long as there have been English words to spell. When the Anglo-Saxons became literate in the sixth century, they took their alphabet from the Romans, but quickly realized that they had three sounds for which the Romans had no letters. These they supplied by taking three symbols from their old runic alphabet: w, þ, and ð. The first, literally double u, represented the sound “w” as it is pronounced today. The other two represented the “th” sound: þ (called thorn) and ð (called eth and still used in Ireland).

The first Norman scribes came to England and began grappling with what to them was a wholly foreign tongue—a fact clearly evident in many of the spellings from the Domesday Book. In just one small parish in Yorkshire, Hanlith was recorded as Hagenlith, Malham as Malgham, and Calton as Colton—all spellings that were probably never used locally. Many such errors can be attributed to carelessness and unfamiliarity, but others clearly reflect Norman orthographic preferences. The Normans certainly did not hesitate to introduce changes they felt more comfortable with, such as substituting qu for cw. Had William the Conqueror been turned back at Hastings, we would spell queen as cwene. The letters z and g were introduced and the Old English ð and v were phased out. The Normans also helped to regularize such sounds as ch and sh, which in Anglo-Saxon could be rendered in a variety of ways. They substituted o for u in certain words such as come and one, and they introduced the ou spelling as in house and mouse. These changes made things more orderly and logical for Norman scribes, but not necessarily for later native speakers of English.

As we have seen elsewhere, the absence of a central authority for the English language for three centuries meant that dialects prospered and multiplied. When at last French died out and English words rushed in to take their place in official and literary use, it sometimes happened that people adopted the spelling used in one part of the country and the pronunciation used in another. That is why we use the western England spellings for busy and bury, but give the first the London pronunciation “bizzy” and the second the Kentish pronunciation “berry.” Similarly, if you’ve ever wondered how on earth a word spelled one could be pronounced “wun” and once could be “wunce,” the answer in both cases is that Southern pronunciations attached themselves to East Midland spellings. Once they were pronounced more or less as spelled—i.e., “oon” and “oons.”

Even without the intervention of the Normans, there is every reason to suppose that English spelling would have been a trifle erratic. Largely this is because for the longest time people seemed emphatically indifferent to matters of consistency in spelling. There were exceptions. As long ago as the early thirteenth century a monk named Orm was calling for a more logical and phonetic system for English spelling. (His proposals, predictably, were entirely disregarded, but they tell scholars more about the pronunciation of the period than any other surviving document.) Even so, it is true to say that most people throughout much of the history of the English language have seemed remarkably unconcerned about niceties of spelling—even to the point of spelling one word two ways in the same sentence, as in this description of James I by one of his courtiers, in which just eight words come between two spellings of clothes: “He was of a middle stature, more corpulent though in his clothes than in his body, yet fat enough, his cloathes being ever made large and easie. . . .” Even more remarkably perhaps, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words by Robert Cawdrey, published in 1604 and often called the first English dictionary, spelled words two ways on the title page [cited by Crystal, The English Language, page 204].

Throughout this period you can find names and words spelled in many ways—where, for instance, has been variously recorded as wher, whair, wair, wheare, were, whear, and so on. People were even casual about their names. More than eighty spellings of Shakespeare’s name have been found, among them Shagspeare, Shakspere, and even Shakestaffe. Shakespeare himself did not spell the name the same way twice in any of his six known signatures and even spelled it two ways on one document, his will, which he signed Shakspere in one place and Shakspeare in another. Curiously, the one spelling he never seemed to use himself was Shakespeare. Much is often made of all this, but a moment’s reflection should persuade us that a person’s signature, whether he be an Elizabethan playwright or a modern orthodontist, is about the least reliable way of determining how he spells his name. Many people scrawl their signatures, and Shakespeare was certainly one of history’s scrawlers. In any case, whether he used the spelling himself or not, Shakespeare is how his name appears on most of the surviving legal documents concerning him, as well as on the title pages of his sonnets and on twenty-two of the twenty-four original quarto editions of his plays.

Still, there is no gainsaying that people’s names in former times were rendered in a bewildering variety of ways—some of which bore scant resemblance to the owner’s preferred name. Christopher Marlowe was sometimes referred to by his contemporaries as Marley. The foremost printer of the Elizabethan age variously signed himself, in print, John Day or Daye or Daie. Charlton Laird in The Word cites a man of the period whose name is variously recorded as Waddington, Wadigton, Wuldingdoune, Windidune, Waddingdon, and many others.

An odd fact of spelling from earlier times is that although writing must have been a laborious affair there was little inclination to compress words or simplify spellings—indeed, by all evidence, the opposite was the case. Cromwell habitually spelled it as itt, not as nott, be as bee, and at as atte, and such cumbersome spellings can be found in manuscripts right up until the modern period. It seems curious indeed that people were not driven to more compact spellings by writer’s cramp if not by urgency.

Before 1400, it was possible to tell with some precision where in Britain a letter or manuscript was written just from the spellings. By 1500, this had become all but impossible. The development that changed everything was the invention of the printing press. This brought a much-needed measure of uniformity to English spelling—but at the same time guaranteed that we would inherit one of the most bewilderingly inconsistent spelling systems in the world.

The printing press, as every schoolchild knows, was invented by Johann Gutenberg. In fact, history may have given Gutenberg more credit than he deserves. There is reason to believe that movable type was actually invented by a Dutchman named Laurens Janszoon Koster (or Coster) and that Gutenberg—about whom we know precious little—learned of the process only when one of Koster’s apprentices ran off to Mainz in Germany with some of Koster’s blocks and the two struck up a friendship. Certainly it seems odd that a man who had for the first forty years of his life been an obscure stonemason and mirror polisher should suddenly have taken some blocks of wood and a wine press and made them into an invention that would transform the world. What is certain is that the process took off with astonishing speed. Between 1455, when Gutenberg’s first Bible was published, and 1500 more than 35,000 books were published in Europe. None of this benefited Gutenberg a great deal—he had to sell his presses to one Johann Fust to pay his debts and died in straitened circumstances in 1468—but it did attract the attention of an expatriate Englishman living in northern Belgium.

William Caxton (1422–91) was a rich and erudite English businessman based in Bruges, then one of the great trading cities of Europe. In the late fifteenth century, intrigued by the recent development of printing in Germany and sensing that there might be money in it, Caxton set up his own publishing house in his adopted city and there in 1475 he published Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy. So, a little ironically, the oldest publication in English was not printed in England, but in Flanders.

Returning to England and setting himself up in the precincts of Westminster Abbey in London (which explains, incidentally, why printing unions to this day use such quaint terms as chapel for union branch and father for the head of the chapel), Caxton began to issue a torrent of books of all types—histories, philosophies, the works of Chaucer and Malory, and much else—and became richer still. The possibilities for quick and easy wealth led others to set up presses in competition.

By 1640, according to Baugh and Cable, more than 20,000 titles were available in Britain—that’s not simply books, but titles. With the rise of printing, there was suddenly a huge push toward regularized spelling. London spellings became increasingly fixed, though differences in regional vocabulary remained for some time—indeed exist to this day to quite a large extent. But just as a Yorkshireman or Scottish Highlander of today must use London English when he reads, so in the sixteenth century the English of the capital became increasingly dominant in printed material of all types. Although many irregularities persisted for some time, and Caxton himself could note in his famous aforenoted anecdote that a Londoner seeking eggs in nearby Kent could scarcely make himself understood, the trend was clearly toward standardization, which was effectively achieved by about 1650.

Unluckily for us, English spellings were becoming fixed just at the time when the language was undergoing one of those great phonetic seizures that periodically unsettle any tongue. The result is that we have today in English a body of spellings that, for the most part, faithfully reflect the pronunciations of people living 400 years ago. In Chaucer’s day, the k was still pronounced in words like knee and know. Knight would have sounded (more or less) like “kuh-nee-guh-tuh,” with every letter enunciated. The g was pronounced in gnaw and gnat, as was the l in words like folk, would, and alms. In short, the silent letters of most words today are shadows of a former pronunciation. Had Caxton come along just a generation or so later English would very probably have had fewer illogical spellings like aisle, bread, eight, and enough.

But it didn’t end there. When in the seventeenth century the English developed a passion for the classical languages, certain well-meaning meddlers began fiddling with the spellings of many other words in an effort to make them conform to a Latin ideal. Thus b’s were inserted into debt and doubt, which had previously been spelled dette and doute, out of deference to the Latin originals, debitum and dubitare. Receipt picked up a p by the same method. Island gained its s, scissors its c, anchor its h. Tight and delight became consistent with night and right, though without any etymological basis. Rime became rhyme. In several instances our spelling became more irregular rather than less. Sometimes these changes affected the pronunciation of words, as when descrive (or descryve) became describe, perfet (or parfet) became perfect, verdit became verdict, and aventure had a d hammered into its first syllable. At first all these inserted letters were as silent as the b in debt, but eventually they became voiced.

A final factor in the seeming randomness of English spelling is that we not only freely adopt words from other cultures, but also tend to preserve their spellings. Unlike other borrowing tongues, we are generally content to leave foreign words as they are. So when, say, we need a word to describe a long counter from which food is served, we absorb buffet, pronounced “buffay,” unconcerned that it jars with the same word meaning to hit but pronounced “buffit.” In the same way it seldom bothers us that words like brusque, garage, and chutzpah all flout the usual English pattern. Speakers of many other languages would not abide such acoustic inconsistency.

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” [quoted in State of the Language, page 149]. 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).[4]

“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—liv, tho, thru, wisht, catalog, definit, gard, giv, hav, 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 [page 491], 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 havnt, for example. At his death in 1950, 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 toward regularity.

Even so, there is still, on the face of it, a strong case for spelling reform. Anyone who has tried to explain to an eight-year-old, or even a teenager, the difference between wring and ring or between meet, meat, and mete, or why we spell hinder with an e but hindrance without, or why proceed has a double e but procedure doesn’t, or why we spell enough, biscuit, and pneumonia in the very peculiar ways that we do will very probably appreciate that. But calls for spelling reform inevitably overlook certain intractable problems. One is that the old spellings are well established—so well established that most of us don’t notice that words like bread, thought, and once are decidedly unphonetic. Attempts to simplify and regularize English spelling almost always hav a sumwut strānj and ineskapubly arbitrary lūk abowt them, and ov cors they kawz most reederz to stumbl. There is a great deal to be said for the familiarity of our spellings, even if they are not always sensible. What simplified spelling systems gain in terms of consistency they often throw away in terms of clarity. Eight may be a peculiar way of spelling the number that follows seven, but it certainly helps to distinguish it from the past tense of eat. Similarly, the syllable seed can be spelled a variety of ways in English—seed, secede, proceed, supersede—but if in our quest for consistency we were to fix on the single spelling of, say, seed, we wouldn’t be able to distinguish between reseed and recede. Fissure would become fisher; sew and sow would be so. There would be no way to distinguish between seas and seize, flees and fleas, aloud and allowed, chance and chants, air and heir, wrest and rest, flu, flue, and flew, weather, whether, and wether, and countless others. Perplexity and ambiguity would reign (or rain or rein).

And who would decide which pronunciations would be supreme? Would we write eether or eyther? As we have already seen, pronunciations often bear even less relation to spellings than we appreciate. In spoken American English, many millions of people—perhaps the majority—say medal for metal, hambag for handbag, frunnal for frontal, tolly for totally, forn for foreign, and nookular for nuclear. Shall our spellings reflect these? The fact is, especially when looked at globally, most of our spellings cater to a wide variation of pronunciations. If we insisted on strictly phonetic renderings, girl would be gurl in most of America (though perhaps goil in New York), gel in London and Sydney, gull in Ireland, gill in South Africa, gairull in Scotland. Written communications between nations, and even parts of nations, would become practically impossible. And that, as we shall see in the next chapter, is a problem enough already.