Howz yor speling? An organisation known as the International English Spelling Congress has just voted in favour, or favor, of major reform.
Apparently, English takes up to three years longer to master than other languages, and the peculiarities of our spelling sytem are at least partly to blame.
The congress is concerned that far too many English words don’t sound the way they are spelt, or, indeed, spelled. Traditional Spelling Revised, or TSR, aims to get rid of silent letters such as ‘w’ in wrong.
If they have their way, rong will soon be right, rite will no longer be rong, and illogical spellings such as colonel, biscuit, yacht, daughter, parliament and knife will all be simplified.
With this in mind, it can’t be long before they vote to change their name to the Intunashnal Speling Congris.
Perhaps they might even be persuaded to open their annual conference with a medley of Slade’s greatest hits — Cum On Feel The Noize, Coz I Luv You, Look Wot You Dun.
The International English Spelling Congress is concerned that far too many English words don’t sound the way they are spelt, or, indeed, spelled (file image)
Those who find spelling easy tend to pooh-pooh the idea that it should be simplified. They prefer to equate poor spelling with stupidity. How they rejoiced in 2013 when Donald Trump bragged that he’d just been named the third most envied man in America, tweeting that ‘the small group of haters and losers must be nauseas’.
Back in 1992, the target of their derision had been U.S. vice president Dan Quayle, who sent an official Christmas card declaring America to be ‘the beakon of hope for the world’. Later, poor old Quayle was filmed urging a schoolboy to change his spelling of ‘potato’ to ‘potatoe’.
Conservatives giggled when Tony Blair spelt the word ‘tomorrow’ wrong three times in the course of a single letter to a by-election candidate. In the same way, Left-wingers rejoiced at the revelation that the note written by Margaret Thatcher for her famous 1979 election victory speech included the word ‘dispair’.
Speaking for myself, I couldn’t help smiling when I heard that pompous know-all Jacob Rees-Mogg had published a book in which he referred to ‘Pontius Pilot’.
But, then again, poor spellers have long been a feature of politics. The 19th-century prime minister Lord Palmerston once gave a spelling test to his Cabinet, dictating this tricky sentence for them to copy out: ‘It is disagreeable to witness the embarrassment of a harassed pedlar gauging the symmetry of a peeled potato.’ Not one of them managed to spell every word correctly.
On the other hand, poor spellers are in excellent company. After all, Jane Austen titled her first book, written when she was 15 years old, Love And Freindship.
Speaking for myself, I couldn’t help smiling when I heard that pompous know-all Jacob Rees-Mogg had published a book in which he referred to ‘Pontius Pilot’
The first draft of The Great Gatsby contained hundreds of spelling mistakes, among them ‘chaoticly’ for ‘chaotically’, ‘ecceptionally’ for ‘exceptionally’, and ‘yatch’ for ‘yacht’. The novel’s author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, often addressed his best friend Ernest Hemingway as ‘Ernest Hemmingway’ or even ‘Earnest Hemmingway’.
Surnames are often tricky. In 1965, the Queen wrote Noel Coward a letter: ‘Could you not come down to Sandringham for the night of July 20th — when a famous old Russian cellist (I can’t spell him) is playing in one of our lovely old churches?’
And place names, too, can be a minefield. Did Zbigniew Brzezinski ever visit Kyrgyzstan?
Interestingly, poor spellers often over-compensate by adding one or two extra letters to a word. The late poet laureate Ted Hughes favoured ‘develope’, ‘mentionned’, ‘daffodill’ and ‘alltogether’.
Before the advent of the printing press, how you spelt a word was largely up to you. It was not until 1500, as printed books grew more common, that spelling became increasingly standardised.
And as spelling became more uniform, demands for its simplification increased. Rationalists have always been enraged by the illogicality of English spelling.
George Bernard Shaw highlighted the disconnect between letters and sounds by pointing out that the word ‘fish’ might be better spelled ‘ghoti’ — after all, the ‘gh’ from ‘enough’ sounds like an ‘f’, the ‘o’ in ‘women’ sounds like an ‘i’, and the ‘ti’ in ‘nation’ sounds like ‘sh’.
How complicated it all is! The International English Spelling Congress certinly has a mountin to clim. It all reminds me of a joke we used to tell in the school playground. ‘Floccinaucinihilipilification is a very hard word to spell. Can you spell it?’
And the answer, of course, is ‘it’.