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

by David Wolman

  A neologistic and orthographic explosion may be under way in cyberspace, but we still live in a world, for now, in which many people want to buy bound books that contain most of, or at least a terrifically intelligent version of, the English language. Watching me take notes during my visit, Morse nodded toward my notepad. “You’d be nuts not to use shorthand or write through as t-h-r-u in there,” he said. “But as the editor and publisher of a dictionary, I don’t have a lot of latitude with creative spellings.” Morse must try and lasso every last word, form and meaning, and I suspect that the impossibility of ever completing that task motivates him to conduct his duties with a sense of hyperdelicacy—which of course isn’t a real word. Or is it? How would you spell it?

  EPILOGUE

  THE PORTLAND SPELLING BEE

  Like any other language, English ultimately reflects the imagination and creativity of those who speak and write it, from poets and scholars to crooks and beggars.

  Robert Clairborne, Our Marvelous Native Tongue.1

  SPOTLIGHTS MAKE IT HARD not to squint. Before my turn at the microphone, I fidgeted in my seat, crossing my legs and taking gulps of beer. Now I’m standing at the front edge of the stage and there’s nothing to do but fold my arms and try to hide the fact that while others are here for fun, I’m here to exorcise a demon.

  The audience quiets and the announcer says my word: kugel.

  Kugel, I repeat back, the first syllable exploding through the sound system like a cough. I’m fairly confident I know how to spell this word, but childhood scars never truly heal. This is a spelling bee, for God’s sake. Maybe the more manageable first-round words aren’t so easy after all. Am I absolutely positive about -el instead of -le?

  I ask for the language of origin, just for the sake of doing it, but I’m too anxious to process the response. The same goes for an example sentence. (For the record: from Yiddish, a baked pudding, served as a side dish or dessert.)

  Kugel: k-u-g-e-l. Kugel.

  That’s correct, says the announcer.

  Since beginning this project, I have occasionally attended the Monday night spelling bee for adults at a pizza-pub-music-venue near my home in Portland, Oregon. The organizer pulls words from the same word lists used for the National Spelling Bee, but the atmosphere is substantially more relaxed than at Scripps. Participants bring their pints of microbrew on stage, there’s a generous intermission for refills and no one seems to mind the occasional hint or mulligan. My MO was to sit in the back, watching, telling myself that this was research. Really, though, I was too nervous to sign up as a contestant. To legitimize the experience, I promised myself that once the book was completed, I would finally step up.

  As number fifteen among fifteen participants, I have the advantage of prior attrition, as other spellers fall out of the running. Lupine, purloin, exigencies, hubristic, oligopsony, navicular. I make nervous jokes to the woman to my right, admiring her easygoing stage presence. She is a short-haired hipster. When it’s her turn to spell, I imagine her launching into a lecture about standard versus correct spelling, about language creativity versus conformity, and about how to reconcile our individual-rights sensibilities with what often appears to be a willingness to bow meekly in response to language experts’ declaratives.

  Why is it, she asks the crowd, that we accept inventive spelling on Madison Avenue but not on high-school term papers? Lite beer, rite aid, krispy kreme, citibank, sunkist, truvalue, humvee, qwest—sure, they look odd without the capital letters and brand-associated fonts. But they’re just words—our words—spiced up on behalf of someone else’s corporate identity. Fist in the air, the hipster lady says we need to reclaim the orthographic creativity that is rightfully ours.

  My next word is icebound, a lucky break except that it’s accompanied by resentful looks from previously eliminated contestants who drew harder words. I don’t rush my reply, but also don’t ask for specifics.

  Icebound: i-c-e-b-o-u-n-d. Icebound.

  That’s correct, says the announcer, and I return to my seat. Kilderkin, meiobars, homuncular, dyscalculia. This last one grabs my attention: “from Latin and Greek, impairment of mathematical ability due to an organic condition of the brain.” A slightly frenetic woman wearing a yellow Portland Spelling Bee Champion T-shirt mentions to the audience that she’s a grade-school science teacher. She sits down again but in my mind she’s halfway into a sermon about how children nowadays are doing horribly in math and science, while every year the emphasis on and adoration of spelling bees continues to intensify. “What’s up with that?” she asks.

  Scarifier, macrophagous, nephrolithotomy. My next word is odori, meaning a type of Japanese dance. When I hear the word it suddenly dawns on me that I might actually win this thing. Because I lived in Japan for a few years, I happen to know that with Japanese words written out in English, what you hear is almost invariably what you get.

  Odori: o-d-o-r-i. Odori.

  With that I’m now one of just five remaining contestants, including the overzealous former champion and two older gentlemen, one of whom sips a drink from a tumbler, and the other a confessed word maniac and former law professor.

  In the bee in my brain, the professor speaks lucidly to the crowd: Why is it, he asks, that so many of us think spell-check and text messaging harm language skills? For centuries people have been whining about English’s descent into barbarity, perpetually captivated by this fantasy of a more refined, higher caliber English of bygone eras. I hate to break it to you, class, but English and the spelling code are not in danger.

  My final word is decuman. An adjective from Latin, it means extremely large or immense, usually in reference to a wave. The sample sentence was: That decuman wave that took the ship fore and aft swept the life raft off the deck.

  Decuman: d-e-c-u-m-e-n. Decuman.

  Ding.

  Consolation prize (a Tootsie Pop) in hand, I watch the professor triumph over the other three finalists, and in so doing earn a twenty-dollar gift certificate, T-shirt, and bragging rights.

  During the early months of my research, I had taken David Crystal’s assessment to heart. Maybe I was born about one thousand years too late, belonging instead to an age when English had a mostly phonetic and unpoliced spelling code, and no one seemed to mind. But now I’m thinking I was born at just the right time. The Internet and the word-making explosion it has spawned are still so new that the impact on English is only just beginning. Novel challenges to usage authority are already emerging, as more and more people see words not as untouchable objects in a museum, but as clay that they too can shape.

  Where’s spelling going? My money is on the teens sending text messages and filling up chatrooms with content that most language watchers aren’t seeing. They are the new stewards of orthography, tomorrow’s “sovereigns over the realms of language.” And at the risk of sounding naively optimistic, I don’t think that spells trouble.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To everyone in my family: Thank you for your enthusiasm and encouragement.

  Thank you, David and Hillary Crystal. You were supportive of this project from the beginning, road trip and all, and I am grateful for your generosity and guidance. For their careful reading and assistance large and small, I also want to thank my friends, especially Heather Wax, Joshua Davis, Aaron Earnst, Paul Collins, and Mark Robinson.

  I would also like to thank: Howard and Helen Webber, Uta Frith, Guido Latre, Les Earnest, Win Carus, Henry Ku era, Jack Lynch, Anne Castles, Rawls Moore, Kate Burridge, and Tom Zeffiro. Alexander Macgillivray, Peter Norvig, Noah Coccaro and Karen Wickre at Google; Mike Calcagno, Ann Brocken-brough and Doug Potter at Microsoft; John Morse, Arthur Bicknell, and Jim Lowe at Merriam-Webster Inc.; Nanci Bell and Gail Phillips at Lindamood-Bell Learning Centers, and Christopher Dobbs of the Noah Webster House & West Hartford Historical Society. Masha Bell, Elizabeth Kuizenga, Niall Waldman, Alan Mole, Peter Boardman, Roberta Mahoney, Timothy Travis, Alan Campbell, and Jack Bovill of the Simplified Spelling Society
and American Literacy Council, as well as Timothy Bates, Jill Lepore, Maria Mody, Rebecca Treiman, Carolyn Damp, Steven Molinsky and two very smart doctors in England.

  Thank you to T. J. Kelleher of Smithsonian Books (now at Seed magazine) for a great idea. Thank you Elisabeth Dyssegaard, my editor, and Giles Anderson, my agent, for taking care of business.

  Finally, thank you Nicola. Your love and support are more inspiring every day.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER 1: WAR OF THE WORDS

  1. His speech was titled simply: Orthography.

  2. Stanford University and the 1906 Earthquake, http://quake06.stanford.edu/centennial/timeline/index.html

  3. Robert Burchfield, The English Language (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1985), 147.

  4. Monroe E. Deutsch, Abundant Life: Benjamin Ide Wheeler (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2003) (1926).

  5. Chicago Evening Post July 30, 1913; Melvil Dewey Papers, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries, Box 88.

  6. Melvil Dewey Papers, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries, Box 88.

  7. George R. Ranow, American Speech, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 1954), 36–44.

  8. Seth Lerer, Inventing English (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 22.

  CHAPTER 2: CROSSED

  1. From Noah Webster to Merriam-Webster: Celebrating 200 Years of American Dictionary Making (Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster Inc., 2006), 51.

  2. Chronology of Events in the History of English, http://www.ruf.rice. edu/~kemmer/Words/chron.html

  3. Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004), 1.

  4. Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004), 2; “Chronology of Events in the History of English,” http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words/chron.html

  5. Oxford English Dictionary entries for old and olde; Jack Lynch, personal correspondence, April 2008.

  6. Medieval Studies at Georgetown University, http://www8.georgetown.edu/departments/medieval/labyrinth/library/oe/texts/a32.2.html

  7. David Crystal, The Stories of English (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 2004), 15.

  8. Lyrics credited to Naomi Laredo of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders.

  9. David Crystal, The Stories of English (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 2004), 54–55.

  10. Jean Roemer, Origins of the English People and the English Language (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1888), 352.

  11. David Crystal, personal interview, September 2007.

  12. Seth Lerer, Inventing English (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 11.

  13. Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004), 29.

  14. David Crystal, The Stories of English (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 2004), 56.

  CHAPTER 3: REGIME CHANGE

  1. Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004), 32; David Crystal, The Stories of English (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 2004), 145.

  2. Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004), 35–37.

  3. Seth Lerer, Inventing English (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 63.

  4. Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004), 54, 60–62.

  5. David Crystal, personal interview, September 2007; Vivian Cook, Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary: Or Why Can’t Anybody Spell? (New York: Touchstone, 2004), 12; Henry Alexander, The Story of Our Language (New York: Dolphin Books, 1962), 88; David Crystal, The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2006) 26.

  6. David Crystal, The Stories of English (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 2004), 150–151.

  7. Simon Horobin, “Chaucer’s spelling and the manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales,” ed. Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta, and Matti Rissanen, Placing Middle English in Context (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 202–204.

  8. Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004), 105; David Crystal personal interview, September 2007.

  9. David Crystal, The Stories of English (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 2004), 237.

  10. Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004), 82.

  11. David Crystal, The Stories of English (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 2004), 238.

  12. David Crystal, The Stories of English (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 2004), 234.

  13. Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004), 92.

  14. Seth Lerer, Inventing English (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 118.

  15. Seth Lerer, Inventing English (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 118; David Crystal, The Stories of English (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 2004), 236–237.

  CHAPTER 4: PAGE SETUP

  1. “A Reasonable Truth: Gore takes off the gloves,” Oregonian, June 10, 2007.

  2. Fran Rees, Johannes Gutenberg: Inventor of the Printing Press (Minneapolis: Compass Point Books, 2006), 22.

  3. Fran Rees, Johannes Gutenberg: Inventor of the Printing Press (Minneapolis: Compass Point Books, 2006), 14.

  4. Fran Rees, Johannes Gutenberg: Inventor of the Printing Press (Minneapolis: Compass Point Books, 2006), 10.

  5. Guido Latre personal interview, September 2007.

  6. Robert Burchfield, The English Language (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1985), 147.

  7. David Crystal, The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2006), 30–31.

  8. David Crystal, The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2006), 26.

  9. Michael Stubbs, Language and Literacy: The Sociolinguistics of Reading and Writing (London: Routledge, 1980), 25.

  10. Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life (New York: Free Press, 2005), 50 [Citing Twain letter to George Bainton dated October 15, 1888]; See also www.twainquotes.com

  11. Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004), 97.

  12. George D. Painter, William Caxton: A Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976), 22.

  13. George D. Painter, William Caxton: A Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976), 23.

  14. George D. Painter, William Caxton: A Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976), 62–63.

  15. George D. Painter, William Caxton: A Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976), 101.

  16. Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004), 97.

  17. Seth Lerer, Inventing English (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 99.

  18. Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004), 97.

  19. David Crystal, The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2006), 18.

  20. Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil, and William Cran, The Story of English (New York: Penguin, 1986), 87.

  21. David Crystal, The Stories of English (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 2004), 258; Robert Burchfield, The English Language (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1985), 22.

  22. Michael Stubbs, Language and Literacy: The Sociolinguistics of Reading and Writing (London: Routledge, 1980), 51.

  23. Henry Alexander, The Story of Our Language (New York: Dolphin Books, 1962), 89.

  24. Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Langu
age (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004), 89.

  CHAPTER 5: VALIANT EXTERMINATORS OF DIALECTICAL VERMIN

  1. Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004), 120.

  2. David Crystal, The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2006), 16.

  3. Deborah Cameron, Verbal Hygiene (New York: Routledge, 1995), 41–42.

  4. Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil, and William Cran, The Story of English (New York: Penguin, 1986), 92.

  5. Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004), 95.

  6. David Crystal, The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2006), 29.

  7. Henry Alexander, The Story of Our Language (New York: Dolphin Books, 1962), 122.

  8. David Crystal, The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2006), 29.

  9. The Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language, http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O29-B.html

  10. Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil, and William Cran, The Story of English (New York: Penguin, 1986), 136.

  11. Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004), 95.

  12. David Crystal personal interview, September 2007.