How Favour Fell Out of Favor
Blood, good, food. Love, grove, move. Bomb, comb, tomb. Why on earth don’t these words rhyme? (Why do bird, word, herd, and curd?) Why are there so many exceptions in English to one-to-one correspondences between sounds and letters, as opposed to orthographically simpler WYSIWYG languages like Italian and Finnish? And what do you do if you’re a foreigner studying English confronted with, say, womb, and have no way to figure out which of those three possible pronunciations is correct?
David Wolman takes a sort of Sarah Vowellish travelogue approach in Righting the Mother Tongue (Smithsonian Books, $24.95), his popular history of English spelling and why it’s a mess: Why just read books about King Alfred, who pushed his West Saxon dialect as the dominant form of Old English, when you can actually visit Wessex itself? Later, medieval England became essentially trilingual, with Latin the language of the church, French (after the Norman Conquest) of the courts, and English of the masses. The Black Death, which did most damage where people lived closest together—i.e., churches and courts—helped English to the fore, as did the popularity of The Canterbury Tales and the first translation of the Bible into English (1380ish).
Wolman then heads to Antwerp, an early center of commercial printing; mass book production was a great impetus to standardize spelling, as opposed to the personal spelling choices than naturally resulted from hand-copying. The insane letter combination gh, which with splendidly typical illogic is usually either silent or pronounced like f, seems to be a gift to English from Dutch typesetters. Spelling standardization—including, it seems, the deliberate insertion of difficulties, like the silent letters in debt or island—became a tool of class hierarchy; if there’s a right and a wrong way of doing things, you can of course use that as a weapon. British sea dominance and colonial expansion brought a flood of words borrowed from other languages. Samuel Johnson’s vast and erudite dictionary became a standard guide, while Webster’s helped establish differences between British and American spelling. (Wolman visits Webster’s farm and the current-day Merriam-Webster’s offices.) Ben Franklin, Bernard Shaw, and Theodore Roosevelt floated proposals to simplify spelling, the latter taking much heat and ridicule for it—though some of the suggestions he encouraged took root, which is how we lost the u from rancour and the second e from gelatine. Melville Dewey (he of the decimal system) was a lifelong, fervent simplification crusader, offering himself as a role model by styling himself Melvil Dui.
Wolman also introduces us to the present-day reformers who take their crusade to the heart of spelling darkness, picketing the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.; to scientists who test Wolman to see if his own trouble with spelling is due to dyslexia; and to Les Earnest, father of spell-checker software. He’ll bring his book—btw, ask him what he thinks about the encroachment of text-message abbreviations—to University Bookstore tonight (Thurs.) at 7 and Third Place Books on Saturday at 6:30.
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