“It’s a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word.” – President Andrew Jackson
The movement for the reform of how we spell the words of our wonderful language – even if it’s not very well known – has been going on in our great nation since about the time of its founding. Even before President Jackson made his feelings on the subject known, none other than Benjamin Franklin (who wanted the spelling of our collection of 26 letters changed to “alfabet”) wrote that he wanted all letters to have their “sound always the same. It’s also intended that there be no superfluous letters used in spelling, i.e. no letter that is not sounded.”
A few years after Poor Richard had his say, the father of the American dictionary, Noah Webster, weighed in on the subject of simpler spelling, offering several examples of what he considered easier ways for words to be spelled.
While he successfully lobbied for changes in the spelling of words such as “mould” (mold), “gaol” (jail), “draught” (draft) and “centre” (center), not all of Webster’s suggestions were met with open arms. Among his failed attempts at change were the phonetic spellings of “ache” (ake), “soup” (soop), “sponge” (spunge), “tongue” (tung) and “women” (wimmin).
Mark Twain summed up his feelings on the matter with, “Nothing professing to be a defence (sic) of our ludicrous spellings has had any basis, so far as my observation goes, except sentimentality. In these ‘arguments’ the term venerable is used instead of mouldy (sic), and hallowed instead of devilish.”
Among those echoing Twain’s sentiments was steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who put his money where his mouth was on April 1, 1906, when he founded the Simplified Spelling Board, whose early membership included the likes of Mark Twain, Melvil Dewey and Isaac Funk (but not Adam Wagnalls). Carnegie would continue his support of the SSB to the tune of $15,000 a year for the next decade.
(Two years later the Simplified Spelling Society would be started in England. It is currently called the English Spelling Society, whose stated mission is “to raise the awareness of the problems and costs arising from the irregularity of English spelling and to highlight the difficulty of mastering our spelling system.”)
Taking his lead from the SSB, President Theodore Roosevelt signed an executive order in August 1906 stipulating the use of reformed spelling in all of his official communications, stating that “it is merely an attempt to make our spelling a little less foolish and fantastic.”
TR’s plan was shot down two months later by the Supreme Court, which ruled that “Hereafter in printing documents authorized by law or ordered by Congress . . . the Government Printing Office shall follow the rules of orthography established by Webster’s or other generally accepted dictionaries of the English language.”
In December of that year the U.S. House of Representatives voted 142-25 to “withhold funding for the printing of any government document that deviated from the conventional spelling.”
Of course this whole simplified spelling thing had many detractors – even some who’d originally appeared to favor it. Writer George Orwell at first seemed to be in agreement with Andrew Carnegie (who believed English could become the second tongue of countries all over the world) when he opined that “our existing spelling system is preposterous and must be a torment to foreign students. This is a pity because English is well fitted to be the universal second language, if ever there is such a thing.”
But Orwell had second thoughts on the matter when he later wrote that “the difficulty of implementation (and) the need for ‘respelling’ the literature of the past” would certainly be impediments to the plan’s progress.
Concurring with Orwell was writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who asserted that “Reformed spelling might become universal, but it would cease to be the English language.”
Another who agreed with Orwell’s second opinion was novelist H. Rider Haggard, who affirmed that English “as written by the translators of the Bible and William Shakespeare, is good enough, indeed, too good, for me.”
So, were all these attempts to bring about a simplified form of spelling dismal failures or were their supporters simply preparing us for texting? Nuf sed.
Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at jlwitherell19@gmail.com.
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