Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling

by David Wolman

  In a letter to his daughter, Thomas Jefferson counseled: “Take care that you never spell a word wrong…It produces great praise to a lady to spell well.”3 In a 1750 letter to his son, Lord Chesterfield, one of Britain’s highest-ranking officials and an esteemed society man, was similarly concerned: “I must tell you that orthography, in the true sense of the word, is so absolutely necessary for a man of letters, or a gentleman, that one false spelling may fix ridicule upon him for the rest of his life; and I know a man of quality, who never recovered the ridicule of having spelled wholesome without the w.”4 Jefferson and Chesterfield, I imagine, would not be well suited to greet the Scripps Bee contestants in the “recovery room,” which is where they’re sent for immediate consolation and psychotherapy after being dinged off the stage.

  Spelling as a measure of manners, we know. Spelling as a sign of intelligence, we infer. Think about the last time you read a formal letter with misspellings in it and the unfavorable impression it left behind, not just of carelessness, but also lack of smarts. “Spelling,” David Crystal told me, “has become the main diagnostic feature for determining whether someone has been educated in English.” People like to judge, and using language is a fabulously convenient way to do so, never mind whether or not it’s an accurate measure. “Whereas pronunciation is uneven, vocabulary is always in flux and grammar is problematic,” Crystal explained, “spelling shows up in every word and every sentence of our written lives.” Fair or not, it has become a proxy for intelligence.

  The winner of the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee, thirteen-year-old Evan O’Dorney from Danville, California, offered an interesting twist to this conversation. Moments after acing serrafine (forceps for clamping a blood vessel), O’Dorney was awkwardly hoisting a trophy with the help of an E. W. Scripps Company rep. The audience erupted in cheers and cameramen circled into position. Then, beneath the blaze of spotlights and flashes, the boy stood next to ABC/ESPN sportscaster Stuart Scott to tell the world what life looks like from inside the winner’s circle.

  Scott had harmless questions at the ready. He first asked O’Dorney how he spends his time, and whether it’s true that he enjoys music and math more than spelling. (Viewers had already learned this about O’Dorney in a brief montage-style profile of the finalists.) The mere mention of these other activities seemed to snap the champion out of a daze and into a happier mindset. “My favorite things to do are math and music,” he said. “With the math I really like the way the numbers fit together. And with the music I like to let out ideas by composing notes.” Then the buzz-killing blow: “The spelling is just a bunch of memorization.”

  This response posed a problem for Scott. The window of opportunity for a successful postgame interview is limited. Millions of viewers want something satisfying to button up the rather predictable dramatic arc of the competition, and they want it promptly. Funny, inspired, humbled, charmed—it doesn’t really matter, as long as it’s from the winner and as long as it’s positive. What Scott and the rest of the world got instead was a champion dissing the very contest he had just won. (Talk show host Jimmy Kimmel summed it up a few nights later: “What a slap in the face to the other spellers!”)

  SCOTT: “Would you like to maybe reassess your likeability of the National Spelling Bee? How do you feel about it now?”

  O’DORNEY: “Are you saying I’m supposed to like it more?”

  SCOTT: “I’m leaving that up to you. Do you like it more?” Long pause.

  SCOTT: “Maybe, a little bit?”

  O’DORNEY, with a placating shrug. “Yeah maybe a little bit.”

  OVER DINNER AFTER the first day of the Bee, I spoke with Timothy Travis, a sixty-four-year-old Simplified Society Member from King George, Virginia. Working on a glass of red wine, Travis told me that the Society’s centennial next year would mark “one hundred years of failure.” This dire assessment surprised me because Travis is a dues-paying Society member, because he’s here at the Bee, and because earlier in the day he had proven to be the group’s most enthusiastic picket-poster maker. “It’s really sad,” he said. “Reform is just so needed. People are suffering. It’s tragic how so many kids end up feeling dumb because of spelling.”

  In Travis’s view, history offers precious few moments during which revolutions such as spelling reform can succeed. “Now isn’t one of those times,” he said. “Will there be another one in the future? I don’t know.” In some ways he blames himself for having failed to seize a previous window of opportunity. When the Star Trek series was at the apex of its popularity, said Travis, he “should have contacted Gene Roddenberry [the show’s executive producer] and urged him to have characters in the program use simplified spellings.” With Captain Kirk, Spock, Scotty, and the rest of the Starship Enterprise crew using these streamlined word forms, viewers would have seen these constructions as futuristic, efficient, and cool. But nowadays, said Travis, he just doesn’t see a way for Simplifiers to connect with a public that doesn’t seem to care.

  For centuries, an essential roadblock to spelling reform has been the absence of a tribunal that could rule on matters of orthography. Equally problematic, though, has been the absence of a uniform voice. In their conviction that the system is unnecessarily difficult and an obstacle to learning, reformers have a common mission. But on the fix itself, they epitomize discord. During one of our meals together, while Bell and Waldman discussed a nuanced point about fifteenth-century orthography, Boardman leaned to me and said: “You realize what they’re talking about has nothing to do with spelling reform, right?” A few hours later, Bell pulled me aside in the hotel lobby to let me know that the others in the group “haven’t done their homework and don’t really get it.” Kuizenga likes the RITE spelling system, Boardman is sure the MORE system is the way to go, other campaigners are fans of a letter-trimming protocol called Cut Spelng,5 and online you can find still more newfangled reform schemes.

  But like Melvil Dewey, the Society members have concluded that before they can do anything, they must first build a broader political base. After the first day of protesting, we met in one of the hotel rooms to debrief about what went well and what didn’t, and to share the few meager business cards collected from mildly interested reporters. One issue that came up was what to say if a journalist asks how the Society suggests changing the language. “We’ve got to lie!” shouted Waldman, only half joking about the group’s internal discord. The picketers unanimously decided to redouble efforts of evasion. If someone were to ask what words would be changed and how, give a couple of easy examples—friend to frend, for instance. After that, though, redirect the conversation back to the broader theme of increased awareness about why English spelling hinders literacy and therefore needs changing.

  Reinforcements arrived early the next day. One was seventy-seven-year-old Roberta Mahoney from Iowa. A former librarian, Mahoney had recently been contacting all of the 2008 US presidential candidates to tell them about a fail-safe education issue that could attract voters from diverse political backgrounds. (Mahoney has received no response to date.) The other new arrival was Alan Mole, a soft-voiced man from Boulder, Colorado, who, as a former rocket engineer, brings a heavily empirical perspective to the task of reinventing English orthography. With the Ben Franklin look-alike scheduled for early afternoon, things were looking up.

  When I found Masha Bell outside the hotel, she was all smiles. “You’re witnessing the historic revival of the Simplified Spelling Society,” she said. She’d just completed a radio interview with a station based in Birmingham, England, and was scheduled for an interview on GM Today, one of Britain’s most watched morning shows. Waldman, meanwhile, was charming a Canadian reporter, who had used his Ontario address as a tie-in for a story about the protesters. Despite the heat and continuous vitriol from pissy pedestrians—“You’re acting like you’re spitting on these kids!”—Waldman stayed upbeat and on message.

  A few hours later, Bell hit more pay dirt. The Times of London Web site had jus
t posted a piece about the Bee, accompanied by a retrospective about English orthography and a discussion with Bell that didn’t make her sound like a wacko. “This is worth its weight in gold,” she said. “Better than gold, really.” Until that point, Bell had been thinking of skipping the transatlantic trip next year; it’s tiring and not cheap. But with this flurry of new interest, she was beginning to have second thoughts.

  Then Ben Franklin arrived by taxi. The uncomfortable-looking stockings, tight maroon velvet vest, and eighteenth-century man-blouse made for an impressive costume, but it was the excessive girth, round spectacles, and light waves of unkempt gray hair that convinced me that Franklin impersonator Ralph Archibald is worth every penny of his one thousand dollar fee. Demonstrating media savvy, Archibald decided to plant himself and a few of us protesters on the corner of H and Tenth Streets. That way, we were positioned in the background of cameras across the street. Television crews were already filming teaser segments in advance of the evening news, with the Grand Hyatt as the backdrop. A number of reporters soon noticed the plump Founding Father and the gaggle of protesters, and, following their noses, crossed the street to introduce themselves. At one point I heard Waldman telling a correspondent that we should try to get the United Nations to establish a committee to control English. For a short period of time outside the Hyatt on that May afternoon in 2007, the journalists outnumbered the spelling reformers.

  Back in the hotel, the Bee had advanced to the point where the spellers were tackling that class of words preserved in the lexicon for the sole purpose of being dusted off and carted out for national competition. Trypanosomiasis, vizirial, leucoryx, genizah, ooporphyrin. The competition room was now packed with families, spellers who had been eliminated, and reporters who looked like they’d had their fill of the Bee. In the hallway, other spellers skittered about, talking about words, watching the competition on a television monitor, and signing each other’s Bee programs. One of them was Emma Manning of Pasadena, California, whose parents I’d spoken with earlier.

  Manning had been knocked out of the contest when she misspelled gardez, a word describing a type of chess move. I asked her mother, Laura, what she thought of the protesters outside. “I think they’re charming,” she said. “Practical? Maybe not. But we went out to talk with them and they were sweet and supportive of Emma. Just about the nicest protesters I’ve ever met. And I’ve been in some protests myself! At some level, though,” Manning continued, “they must know that changing the spelling system is impossible. There’s no governing body. And with phonetics? I mean, there are just so many varying accents.”

  Besides, she said, reform might mean the loss of something valuable. Manning says she sees words differently now that she’s a Bee parent. She had never thought much about all the other languages that influenced English spelling or the different parts of speech, but as her daughter developed a love of words and started studying for the Bee, Manning found that there was much more to spelling than just remembering what letters go where. “It’s those clues and weird little histories that you pick up—that’s what makes it interesting.”

  The week before arriving in Washington, I was in New York City to read through some of Melvil Dewey’s old papers in the archives at Columbia University. One night, a friend took me to a famed Harlem jazz club called St. Nick’s. It’s the kind of place where a legend like Winston Marsalis might show up unannounced for an impromptu performance. We sat in simple metal chairs at tables with plastic tablecloths, drinking beer and taking in the music. Sometime late in the evening, I thought of straitlaced Dewey. Consumed by a need to make the world more efficient, he probably wouldn’t have taken to jazz, with its layered complexity, improvisation, and whimsical journeying.

  What Manning said at the Bee helped me put a finger on something I’d only half understood that night at the jazz club. It has to do with the sense of delight she derives from etymology. Spelling, someone once told me, is a palimpsest, which is a piece of parchment that retains remnants or shadows of old words long since erased. It links us to the past. The technical purpose of orthography is merely to give form to words that then convey meaning, not to delight people by illuminating little histories. And yet it does. For all its unevenness and surprises, English spelling is infused with something undeniably appealing. It’s jazzy.

  But to be honest, while watching the young spellers compete at the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee, rarely did I think about the convoluted beauty of English orthography. I mostly just marveled, and wondered what it is about the human brain that makes spelling tougher for some people than for others.

  NINE

  OF YACHTS AND YETTERSWIPPERS

  “It is impossible even to think without a mental picture.”

  Aristotle

  A FEW MONTHS AGO, I described my troubles with spelling to a neuroscientist. He said he thought I might be a “compensated dyslexic,” and recommended that I get tested. I had never heard the term, but it was true that in my quest to allocate blame for English spelling difficulty, I had yet to look inward. Biology, it turns out, has much to say about spelling.

  I started with a visit to Dr. Uta Frith, a professor of cognitive development at University College London. Almost immediately, she hit me with a spoonerism. A spoonerism is a word-play that involves swapping corresponding letters or sounds in a set phrase. People sometimes do this by accident when speaking fast because of fatigue or nerves. Honey, please pick up some stilk at the more (rather than milk at the store)—that type of thing. When the slipup occurs within a word, the technical term is metathesis.* A common way to form spoonerisms is with paired words, like the name of a person, so that Bob Marley becomes Mob Barley. President Hoobert Heever is another one. All of this is familiar to me now, but when I first sat down with Frith to ask if she thought I might be a compensated dyslexic, I’d never heard of a spoonerism.

  “Lohn Jennon.”

  Huh?

  “Exactly,” she said. “John Lennon. Compensated dyslexics have trouble understanding this.” Only then did she explain the game, disregarding my claim that I didn’t know what was going on.

  “Here’s another one. Bemon Lasket.”

  I tried not to pause, praying that the appropriate synapses in my brain would calculate the correct answer by the time my mouth released that first fateful syllable.

  L-l-l…emon basket.

  “Good,” said Frith. “But incredibly slow.”

  I could feel the blood rising, turning my cheeks bright red.

  Give me another.

  “Helen Mirren.”

  Melon Hirren.

  “Not bad,” she nodded. “But still not fast.”

  Based on our later discussion of my spelling difficulties as a kid, my slower-than-average reading speed, and my slow spoonerisming, Frith told me that I could be a compensated dyslexic. Her assessment was crude in that she didn’t have a chance to give me a formal evaluation; it was more like a reluctant diagnosis at a dinner party. Still, my symptoms were so “classic” that she assigned an 80 percent confidence level to her conclusion.

  In the 1960s, when Frith came to Britain from Germany, she had to learn English quickly, and did. She married an Englishman, and after only a couple of years in Britain, she was amazed that her husband started asking her how to spell words. He was a terrific reader, which only made his trouble with spelling more perplexing. In contrast, Frith was (and is) a spelling whiz. Confused by this discrepancy, and, more broadly, worried about children falling behind in school, Frith set out to learn more. “Back then, no one wanted to acknowledge that dyslexia even existed,” she said. People would say a child is just lazy, has poor eyesight, has parents who don’t read to him, or a teacher who’s inadequate. “I dismissed all those excuses,” said Frith. “In individual cases, yes, these explanations may apply. But not for all children who’re having trouble learning to read and write.”

  Frith sees her prowess with spelling as a deficit in the same way that my (alleged) com
pensated dyslexia is a deficit. “I’m a clinical case too,” she said, describing herself as a “freak of nature.” She’s adamant that spelling skill has nothing to do with being gifted. “It’s a waste of [mental] resources to learn all that spelling if you don’t need it,” she said. “The fact is you can’t help being good or bad at this.” Of course one can train hard to get better, but much of this ability is preprogrammed. (I’m not sure I buy Frith’s assessment that her spelling prowess is a deficit; it sounds a little like a good-looking person describing what a burden it is to be attractive. But I respect the values-free perspective.)

  When it comes to brain function, writing and spelling are essentially subsets of reading. To read, our brains call upon a variety of functions. It isn’t a miracle but seems like one because the human brain isn’t wired specifically for this task. The evolution of written symbols, words, and prose is far too recent in human history for this operation to be coded into our genes.1 Instead, the brain has retooled itself for reading and writing, applying, for instance, visual processing powers that evolved for other tasks, possibly functions like cluing in to the facial expressions of others. This retooling also means the reading system is more tenuous than many of us realize. So many components must communicate and perform with absolute precision: auditory and visual operations; language processing, speech control, image storage, and integration of information to build meaning. Reading may be a favorite form of leisure, but for the brain it’s no walk in the park.