Last week we looked at attempts people have made over the years to simplify the spelling of words we use every day. We’ll wrap up the subject beginning with some changes that took place during the Civil War.
Well-known lexicographer Noah Webster probably had as many fails as he had wins when it came to his ability to change the country’s spelling habits. The score changed in his favor in 1864 when the Government Printing Office adopted many of his suggestions for the Americanization of British words.
For example, the good people at the GPO decided that we should change “-our” to “-or,” as in the word “color,” and turn “-re” into “-er,” as in “center.” They also thought that “-ence” should give way to “-ense,” in words like “defense,” and that “-or” should supersede “-er,” when we talk about a “visitor” and the like, at least in the cases where it had been done in Latin.
In 1898 the National Education Association came up with its own list of simplified spelling suggestions. The winners, since they all appear in my unabridged dictionary, were words such as: “tho, thru, thoro, altho, catalog” and “program” — although not all of those spellings today are in common usage.
Other NEA suggestions, including “prolog, pedagog, decalog, thruout” and “thoroly,” didn’t fare as well.
But the biggest and best-financed effort to push simplified spelling into the mainstream came in 1906, when Andrew Carnegie believed that English could become the word’s universal language, if only its words were easier to spell. Carnegie put up $15,000 a year to finance the new Simplified Spelling Board (SSB), whose members included Mark Twain and Dr. Isaac K. Funk of Funk and Wagnalls fame.
The primary mission of the new organization was the elimination of unneeded letters in words, especially by accelerating the dropping of silent ones. On April 1, 1906, the new group, whose motto is said to have been “Simplification by Omission,” released a list of 300 shortened words, about half of which appeared in standard dictionaries of the day and were already in widespread use.
Many of the group’s original words had been formed by changing “-ed” on the end of a word to “-t,” as in “smelt” and “kist.” The SSB also said that “-re” at the end of a word should change to “-er” (like the Government Printing office had already done in 1864), and “s” should be changed to a “z” in words where it sounded like a “z.”
President Theodore Roosevelt liked this new system so much that in late August, during a congressional recess, he signed an executive order stating that reformed spelling was to be used in all of his official communications.
It turned out that many members of Congress were not impressed with the president’s edict, and when they reconvened in December, they passed a resolution to “adhere to the standards of orthography prescribed in generally accepted dictionaries of the English language” by a vote of 142-24.
Eventually Andrew Carnegie came to believe that changes in spelling should come about naturally. He had also tired of supporting the SSB, so there was no provision in his will for continuing its funding following his dearth in 1919. In 1920 the Simplified Spelling Board disbanded, but not before it had gotten in the last word by publishing the “Handbook of Simplified Spelling,” which, of course, was written entirely in reformed spelling.
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.”
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