by David Wolman
In 1917, Carnegie gave his final donation to the Board, soon after which he decided that the group was “useless.” “I think I have been patient long enuf,” he wrote. “I have much better use for twenty-five thousand dollars a year.”43 That’s not to say that he abandoned the idea at heart. When World War I began in 1914, after most of his contemporaries had already severed their connection to simplified spelling, Carnegie wondered aloud whether an improved English orthography would have catalyzed enough international understanding to have prevented the Great War.44 Dewey wrote one of Carnegie’s handlers in 1917, about the philanthropist’s decision to turn off the faucet: “The war makes it dubly desirabl to work just now. Mr Carnegie’s great interest was becauz he saw that this wud help imensly in making English the world language, and war conditions are paving the way for this as never befor. In the language of the prayerbook, I beg and beseech yu not to make this dredful mistake.”45
Over the next two decades, the movement slowed to a barely perceptible crawl. Dewey, refusing to let the flame burn out, kept at it with his writing and occasional publicity, and the topic received a bit of attention now and then, whenever a public figure felt like lamenting the challenging inconsistencies of English spelling. George Orwell called the spelling code “preposterous.” H. L. Mencken famously wrote: “‘Correct spelling,’ indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck deep in the heat and agony of the world.” John Steinbeck was sloppy with spelling (freindship was one of his frequent slips) and worse with punctuation. His wife, Carol, copyedited and retyped most of his work. Corresponding with a friend and aspiring writer in 1929, Steinbeck wrote: “I want to speak particularly of your theory of clean manuscripts, and spelling as correct as a collegiate stenographer, and every nasty little comma in its place and preening of itself. ‘Manners,’ you say it is, and knowing the ‘trade’ and the ‘Printed Word.’ But…I have the instincts of a minstrel rather than those of a scrivener,” he said, preferring to leave to copy editors the work of comma patrol and spelling “so that school teachers will not raise their eyebrows.”46
In 1934, the Chicago Tribune published an item mentioning that its editor and publisher, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, was changing the spelling of his name to M’Cormick. It was probably a joke, but McCormick wasn’t kidding when he made it house style for the paper to use a short list of simplified spellings, including frate (freight), cigaret (cigarette), and nite (night).47 He insisted on these spellings for decades, but to little or no effect beyond his newspaper.
By the 1940s, academics were still talking about the “defect” of present-day English spelling and likening irregularly spelled words to “picture languages.”48 But by then few people had anything much to say, with the notable and enraged exception of playwright George Bernard Shaw. Shaw called for a new alphabet and new orthography to “prescribe an official pronunciation,” and he left a little money in his will as a cash prize for someone who could come up with a new English alphabet.49 Like Dewey, Shaw was consumed by the idea that people, especially children, were wasting time learning a “foolish orthography based on the notion that the business of spelling is to represent the origin and history of a word instead of its sound and meaning.”50
Toward the end of his life, Dewey didn’t so much give in as retreat. He spent more and more time at the Lake Placid Club in the Adirondacks, where, as acting president of the Club, he managed to maintain his bubble of altered orthography. One 1922 Club “Brekfast” menu featured sausaj, cofi, and huni gridl cakes with Vermont maple sirup. A few weeks before his death in December of 1931, Dewey wrote a letter “to a fu personal frends” reporting good health. He was now eighty years old. “So whyl the world has more to wori about than ever befor in human histori I am bizi & hapi not becauz I am indifferent to thez present problems but becauz my mind is skoold not to wori.” The Simplified Spelling Board was dead. But by then, the torch had already been passed.
Years earlier, while international attention focused on orthography fireworks in the US, another cadre of dissidents was regrouping in England. On September 10, 1908, ten scholars met in the York Room of London’s Holborn Restaurant. Among them were two members of the Simplified Spelling Board. The Americans had come to debrief their fellow reformers about strategies that were and weren’t working back in the US. That night, the Englishmen established a satellite group that they called the Simplified Spelling Society.
They lay low, sometimes dormant, for nearly a century. But they did not die out, as if awaiting just the right time and place to reemerge. They may have found it in modern-day Washington DC. Every spring since 2004, a handful of them have gathered in the nation’s capital to picket outside the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
EIGHT
SPELLRAISERS
If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell friend, I say to them that something’s the matter with the way you spell friend.
Physicist Richard Feynman
THE SCRIPPS NATIONAL SPELLING Bee is the Superbowl of orthography. It’s the time when America’s fascination with unusual talent, juvenile superstardom, and immense pressure—Bee-lovers call it “drama”—converge in a swirling tempest of words, etymologies, parts of speech, and orthodontia. For two days, and especially during the live-television broadcast of the final round, spelling is on America’s television sets, in its newspapers, and in the minds of its people.
I had never been to the Bee. As a kid, if anyone in my school was tapped to participate in a spelling contest, I certainly never knew about it. Maybe the news was intentionally withheld from students like me, so as not to exacerbate our frustration. Yet over the past decade, excitement over the Bee has exploded, thanks to the combined effect of television cameras, the documentary Spellbound, a Broadway musical, and a couple of books and movies. Today, you’d have to live on Mars to escape Bee mania.
The Bee’s prominence also provides a unique opportunity for language revolutionaries. For four years now, members of the Simplified Spelling Society have emerged from their hideouts in cyberspace to descend upon the Bee with picket signs. A couple of years ago, the group was stunned by the far-reaching impact of an Associated Press story featuring one of its members and his protest effort. Despite the tongue-in-cheek nature of the article, the Simplifiers quickly realized that working the mainstream media was their ticket to international recognition and increased attention for the spelling reform cause. By attending the Scripps event, they hope to capitalize on the concentration of journalists, many of whom are desperately seeking ways to punch up their Bee reporting. In 2007, the protesters made their strongest showing yet, with almost a dozen people, if you include the hired Ben Franklin look-alike, and me. I wanted to know what modern-day spelling reformers are up against, so when one of them invited me to join the picket line, I accepted.
During our first morning stationed curbside outside the Grand Hyatt Washington, things got off to a rough start. I watched one woman nearly accost a picketer named Elizabeth Kuizenga. “Uh! With global warming, Iraq, and so many other things going on in the world, you mean to tell me you’re protesting spelling? Ridiculous,” she said. The woman was five paces away before Kuizenga could finish her polite reply about how this wasn’t actually a protest of the Bee but an “informational picket” about improving literacy. After being snubbed, she looked at me excitedly and said: “Isn’t this fun, being an underdog?”
Kuizenga lives in the El Cerrito Hills, not far from Berkeley, California. Her protest sign pictured a bumble bee and the slogan: “Take the Sting Out of Spelling.” Kuizenga is tall, and has blond hair, blue eyes, and an ebullient demeanor. After more than thirty years of teaching English as a second language, the fifty-nine-year-old Kuizenga said she was so fed up with the litany of rule exceptions, homonyms, silent letters, and confusing vowel combinations within English orthography that she decided to
do something about it. “Even as a kid,” she said, “I thought the spelling system was ridiculous. My mind was just too logical to accept it.”
A few minutes later, a bald man wearing a yellow polo shirt paused before entering the hotel and turned to me and a Society member named Peter Boardman. “Go to a library. It’s free. If you can’t learn to read in America, you can’t learn anywhere.” Another guy told us that spelling reform was the most absurd thing he had heard of “since they tried to put clothes on horses,” and a British television producer said, “Yeah, great idea. Let’s just make spelling easy for the stupid people.”
Boardman hails from Goton, New York, not far from Ithaca. His car has an Ithaca Hemp Company sticker in the window. He has pale green eyes, a white goatee, and only a few wisps of hair beneath a Panama Jack hat. The last few years, Boardman was forced to miss the DC gathering because of chemotherapy. “They poisoned me. And I was in no condition to object,” he said wryly. But this year, nothing was going to keep him from joining his fellow Society members. Hoisting his picket sign—“Let’s End the i in Friend”—he said he put off learning the results of his most recent round of blood tests until after his return. He didn’t want the distraction.
While raising nine children and working in special education, Boardman began thinking about spelling reform. He hated all the booby-traps of English orthography, and felt they needlessly made life hard for children. The first place he went looking for more information was the Internet, where he quickly bumped into the Simplified Spelling Society. “At first I thought they were dingbats, which they are. But now they’re my people.” Boardman is a supporter of a spelling scheme known as “MORE Spelings,” which, he explained in an email a few months after the Bee, is “derived from tradishonal spelings withowt regard tu loacal or rejenal acsents,” and in which “pronunseashen is a miner consern in the derivashen.”
Another member of our platoon was Naill Waldman. Originally from Glasgow, Scotland, Waldman now lives in Ontario, Canada. “Spelling is the bullet hole and illiteracy is the exit wound,” he told me. A few years ago, Waldman wrote and self-published a book called Spelling Dearest, all about spelling irregularity. The genesis of the book was a seemingly innocuous question from his son: Where do difficult-to-spell words come from? “Dads like to answer their kids’ questions. If he’d asked me about just one word, or maybe a question about sex—that would’ve been easy,” said Waldman. Fourteen years later, after burning through his life savings, Waldman finally presented the book to his son. “I was sure it’d be a bestseller,” he recalled. As luck would have it, the book was published around the same time as the megahit Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and Waldman believes that bad timing did him in. He admits, though, that the thrust of his book may also have hindered its popularity. “People who love a book about old punctuation rules will hate one that’s calling for change.” It’s always harder to fight the power.
Waldman’s picket sign featured a head shot of Ronald Reagan and the words: “Sensible Spelling: good enuf for him, good enuf for us.” (Reagan used abbreviated spellings from time to time.) Early in the afternoon, a man wearing a stars-and-stripes patterned necktie spotted Waldman’s sign and did a double take. Halting his charge down the sidewalk, he gestured to the portrait of the former president and barked at Waldman: “That’s insulting. He was a great man.” When I later asked Waldman whether he could handle that kind of abuse all weekend long, he laughed. “I’m from fucking Glasgow! I don’t let people like that get to me.”
I had expected some bewildered and unfriendly reactions from the DC commuter set marching past the hotel. But the truly irate responses were from Bee parents. “We have kids in this event and this is insulting to them and what they’ve achieved,” one mother yelled at Boardman. I can see her point. We were stationed directly outside the building where these families were having one of their most exciting and memorable weekends ever. The Simplified Spelling Society 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-pooh-ing the achievements of talented children. Not exactly a stellar PR strategy.
As for the kids, only a few displayed the kind of outward disdain that many adults did; most just looked at us like we were zoo animals. A few came up to ask for buttons, pamphlets, and sometimes to pose for a photograph. One father let his son take a picture, but when Waldman tried to give the boy a button, the father intervened, forbidding the exchange as if Waldman were handing out flyers for a religious cult.
Yet somehow the accumulating criticism and ridicule fueled my comrades’ resolve. Alan Campbell, a quiet seventy-seven-year-old man who came all the way from New Zealand, looked undeterred by the heat from passersby or the nearly 100-degree weather. “If we want to get the message out to the world, this is where we need to be,” he said. Despite his suppressed immune system, Boardman was similarly impervious. When one man zipped past the two of us without so much as a no-thank-you wave of the hand, and then another guy told us we were promoting “stupidity and ghetto talk,” Boardman chuckled: “You’d think his face would splinter if he smiled. The thing is that some people are so traumatized by the experience of learning to spell that they react violently.” Call it PTSpD: post-traumatic spelling disorder.
In spite of our perseverance, colorfully decorated posters, and occasional spats with passersby, media interest that first morning was minimal. At one point, Kuizenga did get to debrief two Northwestern University journalism students. When they finished, I asked if they thought the Society members were newsworthy. “Exiting the building to see protesters is probably worth a short something,” one of them said. A television reporter from New Zealand disagreed, calling the picketers a bunch of lunatics. Just before lunch, I watched one campaigner engage in what appeared to be a civil conversation with a reporter named Russ Thaler from the Comcast sports network. “[Spelling reform] is something I’ve never thought of,” Thaler told me afterward. “But sadly for the members, it’d cost too much money to change the language—you’d have to rewrite books, change street signs, and the education system…But I wouldn’t call them loco. Sometimes you just have to listen, because people way outside the mainstream may not be totally wrong.” But he couldn’t file a story. “We cover sports.”
Masha Bell is a spelling reformer from Dorset, England, who used to be a schoolteacher. “It’s so hard to get media to take this seriously,” she said. “It’s not like it was in the first part of the twentieth century.” Bell spent her early childhood in Lithuania, though you’d never know it from her crisp British accent. She’s sixty-two years old, marathoner-fit and, until you get her talking about language, of genteel disposition. “I’m angry. It’s just so stupid,” she told me. “We waste so much of kids’ lives on something so stupid.” That something, of course, is English spelling in its current form. Bell and her Society fellows are certain that a better understanding of the twisted history of English orthography, and of the difficulties children face in school as a result of it, will hasten the realization that change is overdue. “If they’d left Chaucer’s system intact, English spelling wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in today,” said Bell. Chaucer’s spelling or, more likely, the spelling of his scribes, was in fact quite variable, but Bell’s more general message is valid: History has wreaked havoc on what used to be a more standard and phonetic orthography.
I asked Bell if she ever thought about abandoning the cause, given the long odds and that people tend to read and write with the language they have, not the language they wish they had. Not at all, Bell said. “It’s so defeatist to accept what you’ve got. Never mind about improving things? It’s ridiculous to think that way. We’d still have slavery and women still wouldn’t be allowed to vote.” The history of progress, she continued, is largely made up of episodes in
which people have “tried to improve the lot of the majority. Spelling reform is no different.” When she said this, I thought back to the oft-quoted Oxford professor, Max Müller, who told an audience at the 1901 annual meeting of the National Educational Association that practical spelling reformers “should never slumber nor sleep. They should repeat the same thing over and over again, undismayed by indifference, ridicule, contempt, and all the other weapons which the lazy world knows so well how to employ against those who venture to disturb the peace.”1 Then again, that was before society fell head over heels for spelling bees. If English spelling were rewritten into a simpler, more predictable form, what would happen to this treasured pastime?
After hiding my picket sign under one of the broadcast trucks, I rode the three escalators down from the Hyatt lobby and walked into the conference room to listen to a few rounds of the Bee. It was still early in the weekend, which meant easier words like billiards, utterance, widower, and maniac. Media people were already swarming. I watched one local television reporter practice her introductory clip for the evening news at least a dozen times. During each take she struggled to lift a copy of Webster’s Unabridged into the camera’s view. A reporter with the Seattle Times told me her editor was lukewarm about her proposal for a big, research-driven story on a pending immigration bill. “Then I called to say that I’ve got these Washington state kids in the Bee and he’s like, ‘Front page for you!’”
Obedient, factoid, tomorrow. Watching the spellers, I thought back to those years of remedial spelling book shame and the pressure I felt during shotgun word quizzes at the dinner table. Ever since Johnson’s dictionary effectively cemented in peoples’ minds the right way to spell tens of thousands of words, the ability to spell well has been used as a crude gauge of someone’s education and intellect. In 1875, a correspondent for the London Times, who was traveling in the United States, reported that spelling bees were an American “infatuation,” and that “every town and village is having its ‘bee,’ attended by crowds who cheer the successful and laugh at those who are afflicted with a ‘bad spell.’”2 But the affliction wasn’t written off like a bout of stage fright or briefly bungled arithmetic. Good spelling was—and let’s not kid ourselves, still is—seen as a mark of a smart and refined person.
