As time went on, many English speakers grew to feel the same way. By the end
of the eighteenth century people were beginning to call for a more orderly and
reliable system of spelling. Benjamin Franklin spoke for many when he
complained that if spelling were not reformed "our words will gradually cease to
express Sounds, they will only stand for things, as the written words do in the
Chinese Language.
In 1768, he published A Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of
Spelling, but since this required the creation of six additional letters, it can
hardly be called a simplification.
People began to feel passionate about it. Noah Webster not only pushed for
simplified spelling, but lobbied Congress to make it a legal requirement—
turning America into the only country in history where deviant spelling would be
a punishable offense.
Another enthusiast for simplified spelling was Mark Twain, who was troubled
not so much by the irregularity of our words as by the labor involved in
scribbling them. He became enamored of a "phonographic alphabet" devised by
Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand (which Pitman called Stenographic
Soundhand, thus proving once again that inventors are generally hopeless at
naming their inventions. "To write the word 'laugh,' " Twain noted in A
Simplified Alphabet, "the pen has to make fourteen strokes. To write laff,' the
pen has to make the same number of strokes—no labor is saved to the penman."
But to write the same word with the phonographic alphabet, Twain went on, the
pen had to make just three strokes.
To the untrained eye Pitman's phonographic alphabet looks rather like a cross
between Arabic and the trail of a sidewinder snake, and of course it never caught
on.
But that isn't to say that the movement flagged. Indeed, it gathered pace until by
late in the century it seemed as if every eminent person on both sides of the
Atlantic—including Darwin, Tennyson, Arthur Conan Doyle, James A. H.
Murray (the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary), and of course Twain
—was pushing for spelling reform. It is hard to say which is the more
remarkable, the number of influential people who became interested in spelling
reform or the little effect they had on it.Spelling reform associations began to pop up all over. In 1876, the newly formed American Philological Association called for the urgent" adoption of eleven new spellings—lie, tho, thru, wisht, catalog, definit, Bard, giv, hay, infinit, and ar—
though how they arrived at those particular eleven, and what cataclysm they
feared would arise if they weren't adopted, is unknown. In this same year,
doubtless inspired by America's centennial celebrations, the Spelling Reform
Association was formed, and three years later a British version followed.
In 1906, the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie gave $250,000, a whopping sum, to
help establish the Simplified Spelling Board.
One of the board's first acts was to issue a list of 300 words commonly spelled in
two ways—ax and axe, judgement and judgment, and so on—and to give
endorsement to the simpler of the two. By this means, and with the support of
other influential bodies such as the National Education Association, it helped to
gain acceptance for the American spellings of catalog, demagog, and program
and very nearly, according to H. L. Mencken succeeded in getting
tho established. President Theodore Roosevelt was so taken with these easier
spellings that he ordered their adoption by the Government Printing Office in all
federal documents. For a time simplified spelling seemed to be on its way.
But then, as so often happens, the Simplified Spelling Board became altogether
carried away with its success and began to press for more ambitious—some
would say more ridiculous—changes. It called for such spellings as tuf, def,
troble (for trouble), yu (for you), filosofy, and several dozen others just as eye-
rattling. It encountered a wall of resistance. Suddenly simplified spelling went
out of fashion, a process facilitated by the eruption of World War I and the death
of its wealthiest benefactor, Andrew Carnegie. Its friends abandoned it, and the
Simplified Spelling Board began a long slide into obscurity and eventual death.
Yet the movement lived fitfully on, most notably in the hands of George Bernard
Shaw who wrote archly: "An intelligent child who is bidden to spell debt, and
very properly spells it d-e-t, is caned for not spelling it with a b because Julius
Caesar spelled it with a b.-
Shaw used a private shorthand in his own writing and insisted upon certain
mostly small simplifications in the published texts of his own plays—turning
can't, won't, and haven't into cant, wont, and haunt, for example. At his death in1950, he left the bulk of his estate to promote spelling reform. As it happened,
death duties ate up almost everything, and the whole business would likely have
been forgotten except that his play Pygmalion was transformed into the smash
hit My Fair Lady and suddenly royalties poured in. But, as you won't have failed
to notice, this did not lead to any lasting change in the way the world spells
English.
One of the last-gasp holdouts against old-fashioned spellings was Colonel
Robert R. McCormick (1880-1955), editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune,
who for two generations insisted on such spellings as nite for night, frate for
freight, iland for island, cigaret for cigarette, and some 300 others—though
never all at once. After his death most of the more jarring spellings were quietly
dropped.
Oddly, McCormick never called for two of the most common shortenings, tho
and thru. He just didn't like them, which of course is all the reason that is
necessary when it's your newspaper.
So while spelling reform has exercised some of our finest minds for nearly two
centuries, the changes attributable to these efforts have generally been few and
frequently short-lived. The one notable exception is Noah Webster (about whom
more in a later chapter), though even his changes were not nearly as far-ranging
as he dreamed.
What is less often noticed is that spelling reform has been quietly going on for
centuries, in a small but not insignificant way, and without the benefit of any
outside agencies. In that splendidly random way that characterizes most facets of
English development, it just happened. Many words have shed a pointless final
e-deposite, fossile, and secretariate, for instance. Musick and physick similarly
gave up their needless k's. The tendency continues today with simplified
spellings like catalog, dialog, and omelet gradually easing out the old spellings
of catalogue, dialogue, and omelette, at least in America. Two hundred years ago
there were scores of words that could be spelled in two or more ways, but today
the list has shrunk to a handful—ax/axe, gray/grey, inquire/enquire, and (outside
North America) jail/gaol—but even here there is a clear tendency in every
English-speaking country to favor one form or the other, to move towards
regularity.