The Complete Guide to English Spelling Rules (4 page)

M
ELVILLE
(M
ELVIL
) D
EWEY

The second half of the 19th century saw a renewal of interest in spelling reform. In 1875, the American Philological Society, working with the Philological Society of London, formed a committee, and within a year, in August, 1876, the International Convention for the Amendment of English Orthography met in Philadelphia. There was great enthusiasm for the project. Leading scholars from the best American and British universities, as well as writers and statesmen from both sides of the Atlantic, hastened to support this worthwhile endeavor. Almost immediately, the Spelling Reform Association was formed and they quickly elected as its secretary the controversial genius Melville Dewey.

Dewey was an extremely interesting character whom we may perhaps call the first efficiency expert. While still an undergraduate at Amherst College he worked out a more efficient method for cataloging books. This eventually became the Dewey Decimal System, for which he is best
remembered. He also helped found the American Library Association, was editor of numerous library journals, and in 1887 created the Columbia University School of Library Economy. He was twice elected president of the American Library Association.

Dewey did not limit himself to books and libraries. He was also an enthusiastic proponent of the metric system and worked long and hard to get the authorities to abandon the archaic English system of weights and measures and adopt the new, highly efficient metric system. His arguments were irrefutable, yet today, one hundred years later, the United States is the only industrialized country in the world to still cling to that ancient and cumbersome system.

Dewey took keen interest in anything that could be made more efficient. He was an advocate for the greater use of abbreviations, arguing logically that we use M.D. and Ph.D. without pronouncing the entire title and we always refer to the national capitol as Washington, D.C. Why not apply this simplification to other things? Today the U.S. Postal Service uses a two-letter abbreviation for every state in the union.

When the Spelling Reform Association was created, Dewey was in his element and, with his unbounded enthusiasm, he became the driving force behind the movement. He even changed his name to “Melvil,” and, for a short period, wrote his name
“Dui,”
though he eventually changed it back. When critics complained about the proposed changes he pointed out that
gossip, gizzard,
and
gospel
had once been spelled
ghossip, ghizzard,
and
ghospel,
so why not simplify
ghost
and
ghastly?
He reminded critics that English spelling constantly changes, almost always in the direction of simpler and more logical spelling. He once estimated that learning spelling wasted two to three years of the average student’s schooling.

One editor poked fun at Dewey’s suggestion that we drop the unnecessary
ue
in
catalogue
and asked what we should do when we drop the
ue
in
glue
. Apart from the fact that the editor was deliberately confusing the spelling rules, we see today that Dewey was correct. Catalog is now the accepted spelling.

The Greek
ph
that sometimes seems to saturate our spelling was another irritant to Dewey. If we have
fancy,
he asked, why do we still have
phantom?
Throughout his career he used
fonic
for
phonic
and urged the complete eradication of the
ph
.

Dewey saw at once that the spelling reform movement would need money to promulgate its views, and so he contacted Andrew Carnegie for financial support. Although Carnegie was putting large sums of his immense fortune into public libraries, he was still a hard-headed businessman. His letters to Dewey usually included demands to “show me some results.” Dewy was persuasive, however, and Carnegie supported the reform movement, not only with hard cash but also with a steady stream of letters to the leading newspapers in support of spelling reform. By 1906, Carnegie had increased his support to a generous $15,000 per year.

In his demands for “results,” Carnegie insisted that Dewey send him a list of influential persons who had positively affirmed that they had accepted and would use a minimum of ten of the new spellings. Interestingly, among the selected words were
catalog, decalog, demagog, pedagog, prolog,
and
program,
all of which are now fully accepted.

The spelling reform movement received enthusiastic support from numerous prestigious organizations. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Education Association, and the Modern Language Association all supported reform and the powerful
Chicago Tribune
likewise threw its weight behind the campaign.

The movement soon caught the attention of Theodore Roosevelt, who was a friend of Andrew Carnegie. With his usual energy, Roosevelt leapt right in. He used many of the “reformed” words in his election campaign and, it is claimed, was the first to use
thru
instead of
through
. Cannily waiting until congress was safely out of session, the president gave a list of three hundred words to the government printers and ordered them to use only those spellings. There was an immediate uproar and, as soon as congress reconvened, the printers were ordered to go back to the original spellings.

As early as 1886, the reformers had begun to compile a list of amended spellings. Starting cautiously with only one dozen “crucial” words that included
tho, altho, thoro, thorofare, thru,
and
thruout,
they quickly compiled even longer lists so that within a very short while the list of amended spellings was about 3,600 words long. In 1898, the National Education Association gave its approval to the twelve crucial words. The Modern Language Association had done so five years earlier.

After the initial burst of enthusiasm, there followed years of hard work. Lists were compiled, committees were formed, experts argued endlessly, and a steady stream of letters and
bulletins were sent out. The reformers worked hard to persuade publishers and editors of dictionaries to adopt the reformed spellings and
The Century Dictionary
was persuaded to add the new words as an appendix with an introduction, while the
Standard Dictionary of the English Language
(1893) incorporated all the amended spellings into its listings.

In 1915, there appeared
A Dictionary of Simplified Spelling from the New Standard Dictionary of the English Language; and Based on the United States Bureau of Education and the Rules of the American Philological Association and the Simplified Spelling Board
. It was hoped that this, along with other smaller dictionaries and word lists that had been previously published, would forever reform English spelling.

However, Andrew Carnegie died and with his death, the essential funding dried up. Oral support alone could not pay the bills and the Spelling Reform Association, under its able secretary Melvil Dewey, could not find another generous sponsor. The lack of support can, perhaps, be traced to the fact that Dewey was openly anti-Semitic and had made many enemies in the business community.

Some smaller groups tried valiantly to carry on the struggle, but more important international matters filled the newspapers. A new generation of professors appeared in the universities, and the publishers and editors began to look upon spelling reform as a lost cause. In England the Simplified Spelling Society, which was founded in 1908, still keeps the flag flying bravely, but it is essentially ignored, while in the United States, largest of the English speaking countries, spelling reform is rarely if ever discussed.

Unfortunately, the failure of the reform movement brought about a reaction. Beginning in the late 1930s, various self-proclaimed experts in the field of education declared spelling to be unimportant. By the 1960s, most school report cards no longer gave a grade for spelling. Teachers were told not to “waste time” teaching correct spelling, and the spelling bee and other spelling competitions were dropped from most school programs. Their place was taken by “sight reading” and “creative spelling” along with a serious but misguided reliance on phonics, with the tragic result that a whole generation of adults, including teachers, has grown up to believe the myth that English spelling has no rules and that trying to understand English spelling is therefore a waste of time.

Was spelling reform a wasted effort? The question begs to be asked. Most of the great names in academia on both sides of
the Atlantic, supported by numerous respected societies and organizations, put long years of hard work into something that they truly believed was worthwhile. The movement received the support of statesmen and businessmen and quite a few editors, and yet today it appears to have been for nothing.

A number of good things did come from the renewed interest in spelling, the most important of which was the International Phonetic Alphabet, which consists of a separate symbol for every speech sound the human mouth is capable of producing, no matter what the position of the lips or the tongue. Obviously, there are a great number of these symbols and the IPA is astonishingly complex, but it works well and scholars across the globe, especially linguists, would be lost without it. A simplified version may be found in any good dictionary. Originating about 1860, the IPA has been improved and enlarged and is constantly being revised. Those thinkers of the past who longed for a completely new alphabet based purely on phonics now had what they wanted.

During the early years of the 20th century, there were many who seriously suggested that traditional alphabets should be abandoned and that the IPA, or a modified version of it, should be the basis of all written communication. The heady idea of an international alphabet caught on and, up to about the 1930s, dozens of small books were printed in the new alphabet, mostly in England and Germany. Unfortunately, the movement ran head-on against Esperanto, a language invented by the Polish philologist L. Zamenhof in 1887. Designed as an international language that did not require a special alphabet, it was enormously popular for a number of years. Esperanto is still enjoyed by many, even today, but it is doubtful that it will ever become a truly international language.

The spelling reformers had not wasted their time. It is true that the majority of the suggested new spellings were rejected or even laughed at, but it is also true that quite a few of the suggested spellings are today in general use or given as alternate spellings in most dictionaries. What is just as valuable in the long run is the realization that spelling can change and that new spellings could possibly be more logical and quite acceptable.

A good example is the advertising industry. Before the reform movement, most written advertising was pedantic, long winded, and verbose. The reform movement opened the floodgates, and new spellings, new words and new meanings
poured from the printing presses. Much to the dismay of the purists, the advertising world took reform and phonics to its heart and proceeded to spell things in new and eye-catching ways. It still does.

One of the reasons that the spelling reform movement was not a complete success was British stubbornness. Many distinguished scholars from London and Oxford joined the movement at the very beginning and supported it to the very end, but it must be remembered that the British people had not yet accepted the completely logical spelling corrections that Noah Webster had introduced a century earlier. While the Americans were already using
color
and
center,
the British still had to be persuaded of the correctness of these and many other similar words. The delegates had to persuade their countrymen on the other side of the Atlantic, and in this they largely failed. At that time, when the British Empire was at the height of its power, the British saw the project as an American idea and almost completely ignored it. To this day, British dictionaries still largely ignore the improvements of Noah Webster and those that came from the spelling reform movement, although some dictionaries do mention them as Americanisms.

But Britain is changing rapidly. The isolation is gone. The younger generation see themselves as part of Europe and the world, and many Englishmen speak a second language and regularly go abroad for their holidays. The new generation does not reject the idea that perhaps the modern spellings make more sense than the traditional ones.

A careful study of the more than 3,000 words contained in the
Amended Spellings Recommended by the Philological Society of London and the American Philological Association
(1886) can be a surprisingly rewarding experience. The reformers did not fail, nor was their time wasted. They saw what was wrong with English spelling and they logically and systematically corrected the errors. The fact that the English-speaking world did not immediately accept all their recommendations does not mean that they did not do their work well. On the contrary, they did so thorough a job that the results were too many to be assimilated all at once.

The modern reader has to admire the logic of their thinking, but, at the same time, the reader is repulsed by the strangeness and, at times, the awkwardness of many of the proposed spellings. Changing one’s language after spending nearly twenty years learning it is not an easy thing to do.

When criticized because many reformed words did not look like the original word, Melvil Dewey coined the phrase “visual prejudice.” He was quite right. Good readers are visual readers, and the faster we read, the more we rely on word recognition. We are long past the stage where we sound out each syllable of every word and we barely glance at the outline of a word before instantly recognizing it. Aided by context, we recognize, understand, and process dozens of words in seconds. For this very reason, a typographical error or a spelling error usually stands out clearly and because it clashes with what we know to be correct, it interrupts our reading and is an irritant.