PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

by David Arthur Walters




"And thouh my cage forged were of gold.

And the pynaclis of berel & cristall,

I remembre a prouverbe seid of old,

'Who lesith his fredam, in soth, he lesit all  

For I haue leuer vpon a braunche small

Meryly to syng among the woodis grene,

Than in a cage of siluer briht and shene.



"Song & prisoun haue noon accordance,

Trowistow I wole syngen in prisoun?

Song procedith of ioie & plesaunce,

And prisoun causith deth & destruccion

Ryngyn of ffeteris makith no mery soun

Or how shold he be glad or iocounde,

Ageyn his wil that lith in cheynes bounde?"



--John Lyndgate's 'The Churl and the Bird"--









Many if not most people believe written English as spelled is quite good enough, despite its failure to faithfully represent spoken words as sounded, therefore they would have our words as spelled set in stone. In fact, spell-checking programs are doing just that, much to the satisfaction of many editors, including one who recently declared in a popular writer's digest that he automatically rejects unread any and all articles with spelling mistakes because he assumes any good writer will have and use a typewriter or computer with a spell-checking program. I noticed the pernickety editor had an ugly habit of hyphenating compound adjectives placed after the noun being modified, using, for example, "Those people are English-speaking." instead of, "Those people are English speaking."



Spell-checking computer programs certainly demonstrate how widespread the the tyranny of a top-down technocracy subservient to the power elite has become. Such programs are subjects of no small moment:  they are evidence of the dwindling freedom of individuals who have become so inured to being welcome mats for changes imposed by a small minority, they still believe they live in a free country.  



Long before the advent of automatic spell-checkers, the great Havelock Ellis made these remarks about the modern obsession with standardized spelling:



"We may find an illustration of the plebian anchyolosis of advancing civilisation in the minor matter of spelling....Anaemic ages cannot endure creative vitality even in spelling, and so it comes about that in periods when everything beautiful and handsome gives place to manufactured articles made wholesale, uniform, and cheap, the same principles are applied to words, and spelling becomes a mechanic trade." (THE DANCE OF  LIFE, Boston: Houghton, 1923)



I was recently reprimanded at length for deliberately misspelling "strange" as "straunge", for special effect in my essay 'Grammar.' In that essay, I used the term "grammar" in its broadest sense, as comprising the best of what has ever been said. That best, when originally declared, is often contrary to vulgar opinion. It represents a personal struggle for freedom. True, that struggle is by means of the common currency of language. But that common language is alive when at its best, thus new coins of different denominations and faces are minted for the purchase of previously unheard of goods by and from heretofore unkown persons.



Tragically, in our natural eagerness to imitate and conform, many of us do not realize there would be no common language or society to speak of without the individual struggle against it, for absolute conformity to society would cause it to perish forthwith. Therefore, in my essay, I alluded to grammar as mother's milk, and advised grammarians, once nourished, to rebel. It is by means of its rebellion, its screaming and kicking, that the child learns to know itself. In India, for example, if we trace back our grammar to the first cry, we find the source of all words in "Om" (AUM). We find 'mukta', or liberation, in the infinite regress. Incidentally, the wisest men and women in India do not trust the written word for their wisdom, but rely on hearing the revealed word (sruti) voiced by bona fide spiritiual masters.



My severe critic took me to task for my little written speech on grammar. First of all, he admitted to "just scanning" my words. Then he said that spelling is just the structure of letters in words, that grammar is just the structure of words in sentences, and that this is all determined by society. He stated however, that a "fool may sway public opinion." He concludes with, "So I am saying you should conform to how current society wants you to say/spell the words."  When I objected to his attitude, which is tantamount to blasphemy if god be freedom, he broke off communications with me, much to my chagrin. My consolation is that, in his conformity, he rebels against my dissidence.



Spelling seems to be such a prosaic subject that one might think that everything worth saying about it has already been said. But it has not been said in every way it can be said, and it never will be. Spelling will only be set in stone over the dead bodies of spellers.



There is something magical about spelling, something that casts a spell down through the ages that all may read and tell the old tales while adding their own charm to the gospels. Spelling is not merely the writing down of a series of arbitrary signs called "letters of the alphabet". May Isis, who invented writing in Egypt, forbid! Nor is grammar merely a conventional structure of spelled words. May the Gramarye be restored to its proper place as a magic book of spells! Yes, indeed, may the gospelers live forever in our land.



To recapture the full-bodied flavor of our word 'spelling', we may peruse the MIDDLE ENGLISH DICTIONARY (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1989) for a few examples derived from the old verb spelled 'spellen', or, if you prefer, 'spelle, spele, spelien, spelie, spilen' and so on.



Spellen may be used in the sense to talk, or to tell a story, or to preach. In the sense of talking, here are two examples: "What helpeth lenger for to spelle?" And "It is trouth that ye neuen, I hard hym well spell."  In the sense of telling a story, we have "Fil me a cuppe of god ale, And y wile drinken her y spelle." As for preaching, we have "A fals man began to spell..And gert men fall in heresie."



Spellen can also mean to mean, to interpret, or to read or write.  Take this example for the latter case: "Bot, if yee self willi be blind, Your aun bok yee can noght spell."



Then we have the verb-noun form, "spelling", which can mean the act of speaking, or the faculty of speech, or the casting and reciting of spells, or the act of preaching. When it comes to casting spells, I like "With spellinge of hir charmes Sche tok Eson in bothe hire armes And made him forto slepe faste."  As for preaching, observe "Dauyd saide in his spellynge That Truthe sholde be in erthe growynge to vs byer of alle thynge."



In these examples we can see also the fallacy of the view that dictonaries give a precise definition of words. When I stated in my essay "Grammar" that I meant 'grammar' in its broad sense, my prejudiced critics immediately lept to the narrowest sense. I love what George P. Marsh said on this subject, in his THE ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (New York, Scribner, 1885):



"It is futile to attempt to make that absolute which is, in its nature, relative and conditional, to formulate that which in itself does not constitute an individual and complete idea, to make technical definition a mouthpiece for words which ought to by allowed to speak for themselves by exemplification, and to petrify them into a rigidity of form irreconciiable with that play of feature which is so essential to life-like expressiveness....The signification of the vocabulary belonging to the higher workings of the mind and heart depends on the context, and therefore these words have almost as many shades of meaning as they have possible combinations with other words in periods and phrases."



Incidentally, George Marsh gave Chaucer credit for the greatest language robbery of all time, the one that elevated English over French by swiping French rhyming words and such. He says everything was up for grabs in Chaucer's day, when the prize for authors was fame and not fortune, so what we call plagiarism was the rule rather than the exception. He points out the etymology of the word "invention", means to find or come across rather than to make something new. This brings to mind the poet as "maker." What the poet makes or constructs is a poem. But he does not "make" the truth of his subject: he reveals it.



I believe every writer should write an article about spelling at some time in his or her career. This in fact constitutes my challenge to them to do so in competition with this essay. Since spelling improves with the active practice of writing, not only will the writer learn how to spell better than most excellent readers, but he will learn, if he does his research, that the current spelling conventions are not as good as they are cut out to be. They were fine in their own time for the time being, but humans change over time not by means of the dead letter but with the means of a living language. Spelling is the representation of words by alphabetic symbols for sounds--an accurate alphabet would have a sign for each sound. Our language as sounded changes as change. Manners of speaking including our linguistic sounds differ according to geography and culture. Yet we English-speaking peoples still, thanks to the invention of printing, rely on spelling that does not represent the English we actually speak, but rather more the English of the 16th century.



Once upon a time not so long ago, people felt free to spell as they liked. As long as others understood them, their spelling mattered not, except as a free expression of personal character. Each free speller then was not even a law unto himself, as his spelling of each word was often inconsistent. Shakespeare spelled his own name thirty different ways and thought nothing of it. People were not stigmatized as ignorant or unintelligent because of their spelling. But the forces of conformity working in conjunction with technological advances eventually established a stultifying degree of uniformity in spelling. A standardized orthography or a "correct" was of spelling was imposed from the top down, and now the inability to spell is often very wrongly considered to be the sign of a bad education or of deficient intelligency.



The fact of the matter is, as every suffering child knows, our spelling of English is very unscientific. I mean to say that it is illogical in such a way that it is an insult to the native intelligence or common sense of children. One of the main reasons given for reforming our current spelling is to prevent such blatant child abuse throughout our tender land.



Yes indeed, we have heard about the "corruption" of our written language by the original printers who were foreigners, by the French scribes who changed "nit" to "night" and "cween" to "queen" after the Norman conquest, by the Latin-Greek fashion of turning, for example, "iland" into "island" and "det" into "debt", by the introduction of such bizarre foreign words as "gazette" and "armadillo", not to mention the problem of not having enough letters in the alphabet for all the sounds, of using different letters for the same sounds, and sounding the same letters differently. We have seen Mr. Lounsbury's lists of the absurd results, take for instance the long 'e' in meat, meet, mete, machine, receive, people, key, and so on. Or one form that has many different sounds, such as 'ou" in sour, pour, would, tour, sought, couple, and so on.



We should also recall here the "great English vowel shift" (Jespersen) of the 15th century that left spelling behind as it rearranged the long vowels of Chaucer's time. Mario Pei, in his excellent STORY OF THE ENGLISH LAGUAGE (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1967),  states that "present day 'bite', 'about', 'beet', 'boot,' 'beat,' 'boat' and 'abate', which in Chaucer's day had sounded respectively like 'beet', 'aboot', 'bait', 'boat', 'abet' (prolonged), "bought' and 'abaht', were sounded in Shakespeare's day like 'bait', 'aboat', 'beet', 'boot', 'bate', 'bote' and 'abet.'" Take note that research into the actual pronunciation of words in historical periods is made difficult because it depends on finding the works of writers who had not been taught "correct" spelling.



Furthermore, I just love to be confused by the 's' or 'z' affair, when I spell such words as surprise and comprize. And spell-checking programs have taught me that my of use double-lettering in 'travelling' and 'worshipping' is due to my love for my favourite, colourful British

authors (I wish they were 'authours').



Now then, the time is meet to repeat a couple of old spelling jokes for those who have not heard them.  Observe the 'f' sound in 'cough', the 'i' sound in 'women', and the 'sh' sound in 'nation'. George Bernard Shaw did just that, and declared that 'fish' could also be spelled 'ghoti.'  Then there's the one by G. Dewey, who spelled 'taken' as 'phtheighchound', using the pronunciations of 'phthisic', 'weight'. and 'school' as his guide. Oh, let's not forget the 'cacoughany' that comes from an audience before the concert begins.



Need I go further? Everyone has their pet peeve, but when you try to reform spelling and take it away from them, they scream bloody murder. A writer without a byline in an old Chambers's Encyclopaedia (1906) wrote, "It is hard to reason men out of beliefs they have never been reasoned into, and it may yet be long before our children are relieved of an unnecessary burden to heavy to be borne."  I like to poke about in old encyclopedias, and, when doing so on the subject of spelling I noticed that, as the editions became more current, the less authors complained about the absurd, chaotic, irregular, unpredictable, unscientific, and corrupt nature of our antiquated spelling.



The Cambride Encyclopedia of the English Language (1997) points out that English is not, on the whole, as irregular as we think it is. Studies find that anywhere from 75-84% of our words are spelled according to a regular pattern. Unfortunately, however, "the 400 or so irregular spellings are largely among the most frequently used words in the language, and this promote a strong impression of irregurity." Indeed!



The same reference, which is, by the way, one of the best references available today on the subject, spells out how George Bernard Shaw, who wrote in Pitman's shorthand and had it transcribed, provided in his will for the discovery of a brand new alphabet of at least 40 letters, our own number being insufficient. Shaw thought English spelling was an enormous waste of time, and he sometimes calculated the waste right down to the millions of minutes every day. The result was Kingsley Read's design, which looks like Greek to someone who does not know Greek. It is very scientific in that it represents the phonetic language accurately, but to adopt it would cut many people off from the past as it then appeared, and would entail many other enormous costs including translation costs.



It does seem that the scientific method based on phonetics would throw the baby out with the bath water. I would, then, having a rebellious disposition, have to come to the defense of the very irregularities I deemed absurd, if only they were not fixed in concrete. It is obvious that a scientific one-to-one correspondence of a sign-to-sound alphabet, if spelling is allowed to fluctuate at the daily whim of speakers, might not be music to the ears of everyone, most probably not so to the authorities interested in law and order in the many walks of life, especially those concerned with the coordination necessary for the survival of our rapidly growing population. Yet others, with a medieval nostalgia for the good old days, have no need for scientific experiment and want  to get on with freedom of spellinge. Be that as it may, if we do manage to impose our dream of perfect eye and ear coordination in our writing and speaking, we will be under the rule of precisians yet again--each person then must be a phonetician--just to find ourselves yearning for the beautiful old irregularities.



The ear and the eye operate by virtue of different logics impressed in different processing centers of the brain: what is required is a continual compromise between the two, and not the forcing of one to conform to the other. We may favor the ear over the eye, as many people, given the choice between loss of vision or hearing, would do rather than sacrifice the linear music of life, which is gotten over time and not all at once. Yet what we should welcome is a golden balance of individual preferences, and not the fixation of one extreme by means of bloody sacrifices. The present advance of civilization, if it be an advance, tends to sever the verbal relation of ear and eye. Oral communications are face-to-face, are personal, whereas written communications are impersonal and remote. Remote communications require a great deal of trust in strangers. When that trust breaks down because of personal misunderstandings due to the lack of direct encounters, someone had better get on a plane or war will break out.



I could say much more here in my role as a diletante. Much more must be honestly said and done by our physical and social scientists. But I must conclude with a few more words--please check my spellynge. We laymen must change our whole attitude about science and technology, for we are unwittingly "advancing" too far to an inflexible extreme. We must keep in mind that what we do now limits the behavior of the generations to come, and that our inflexible attitudes now might be their condemnation. We must really think for ourselves everyday. That is hard, stumbling work, much harder than clicking on icons.



I am calling for nothing less than a radical reform of our attitude towards change, in full recognition that what is now posing as "change" is actually the construction of a vast prison system populated by ant-like "humans." True radical reform involves going back to the roots from which truth evolves.



Therefore let us first take our language back. Let us return to our freedom and spell out the truth.