The notion that by reforming the way people employ language you can reform almost everything else is a durable canard that has survived a thousand years of contrary evidence. Concoct a mental image of language utopians and you'll likely summon a stereotype of busy eccentrics. And you wouldn't be far wrong. But their ranks have also included stalwarts like Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie and George Bernard Shaw.
Quite a group -- but how did Carnegie sneak in there?
The trouble with English orthography starts with a simple mathematical fact: the language has 44 distinct sounds but only 26 letters to express them. Letters have to double up (and triple and quadruple up). Add to this a mongrel pedigree and a knack for absorbing new words from all over the world and you have an unruly language that cries out for housekeeping.
Mongrel pedigree? Pardon me for being common. Yes, English, or American English, does readily absorb words from other languages. With a twist, though, now American words are being absorbed by other languages: hamburger, video, gay, are but a few.
Shaw famously argued that the word fish should be spelled ghoti – from the "gh" in cough, the "o" in women, and the "ti" in nation. In his will, Shaw left a small bequest for the winner of a competition to devise a new English alphabet.
Irascible Shaw?
Noah Webster had better luck. The ardent lexicographer and nationalist succeeded in ridding American English of the "u" in words like rancour and humour – spellings, as it happens, that had been introduced in a previous fit of improvement. Webster also won battles against silent or unnecessary letters, like the "k" in publick and the second "l" in travelled. Ironically, he lived out his days in Amherst, Mass., a town whose name is properly pronounced with a silent "h."
Ah-merst? Doesn't sound right. I often add that second el to traveler.
Another child of Amherst (the college) was Melville – later Melvil – Dewey, a hyper-organized young man whose reformist impulses encompassed the metric system and book cataloging. Colonic irrigation was probably in there somewhere. Determined to lead Americans out of their "orthografic swamp," Dewey created his own spelling regime and enlisted Andrew Carnegie to support the efforts of a crusading organization, the Simplified Spelling Board. For decades Carnegie wrote the board a check every year for $25,000.
Ah, Melvil Dewey. Dewey Classification System (R 025.43 D). Colonic irrigation? As in anal-retentive, one supposes.
Dewey's influence reached its zenith in August 1906, when Theodore Roosevelt, a sympathizer, issued an order directing the Government Printing Office to adopt new spellings for some 300 words – for instance, prest, dasht, nite, thoro and good-by. The outcry was immediate and intense. Rusevelt, as one newspaper began referring to him, said that he saw no harm in "the concentration of powers in one man's hands"; but spelling reform, as another paper editorialized, was just "2 mutch." Legislation moved quickly through Congress to countermand this act of executive overreach. Roosevelt withdrew his order.
TR could never be accused of pusillanimity. prest, dasht, nite, thoro and good-by. Prest? Oy.
Eye strike the quays and type a word / And weight four it two say / Weather eye am write or wrong / It tells me straight a weigh.
In MS Word this quatrain is fine. Spelling is correct, but ...
In the end the debates over spelling are skirmishes in the larger war between those who seek to impose lasting order on the way we write and speak and those who believe such efforts to be futile. Most of us keep a foot in each camp, knowing that language both demands regulation and defies control – much as, to take an analogy from physics, we live tidy Newtonian lives in a bizarre quantum universe. It's a serviceable enough contradiction, and what choice do we have? But I doubt we've seen the last of visionaries who refuse to accept it. Dasht hopes lie ahead.
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