Does Spelling Matter?
By Simon Horobin, OUP, 288 pages, £20
The title of Simon Horobin’s book poses what, at first blush, seems a banal question. I imagine most readers would answer “Yes, spelling matters”, perhaps adding “though not as much as some believe”. Yet if the question of how words should be written is not uppermost in many people’s minds, its nagging everyday presence is nonetheless evident in the existence of spell-checkers and school spelling tests, as well as in mnemonics designed to help us with spellings, such as the venerable “i before e except after c”.
Phenomena of this kind betray an unease about the irregularities of spelling, and English spelling (Horobin’s focus, though he does say a bit about spelling reform in French, Dutch and German) has long drawn complaint. This has ranged from the smooth-tongued — Jerome K. Jerome’s line that English spelling “would seem to have been designed chiefly as a disguise to pronunciation” — to the splenetic, such as the view of the Austrian linguist Mario Wandruszka that it is “an insult to human intelligence”. Lament is certainly the norm, so it may be a surprise to meet with the assessment of Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle that English spelling “comes remarkably close to being an optimal ... system”. Horobin, an Oxford professor whose previous work has mainly been about Chaucer, doesn’t go that far. But he does argue against spelling reform, on the grounds that the complex and inconsistent detail of English spelling is “testimony to the richness of our linguistic heritage and a connection with our literary past”.
He begins with some remarks on the social stigma that is so often attached to misspelling. To this purpose he quotes the 18th-century diplomat Lord Chesterfield, who described secure orthography as “absolutely necessary” and recalled “a man of quality, who never recovered [from] the ridicule of having spelled wholesome without the w”. In the eyes of Chesterfield, who advocated hyper-attentiveness in all social situations, dropping a w was as bad as dropping a baby.
Chesterfield’s attitude was only an embellished version of common prejudice. A good command of spelling is generally regarded as evidence of a tidy mind. Meanwhile people who are poor at spelling are treated as if they are stupid, whatever the evidence to the contrary, and are also suspected of not knowing they can’t spell. Horobin notices that iffy spelling is “often viewed as a reflection of a person’s morality”. It is true that we see other people’s wayward spelling as evidence of other forms of waywardness. A covering letter that concludes “I look foward to herring from you shorty” isn’t going to enhance its author’s job prospects. You may well be reluctant to buy a “labtop computer” or “emrold necklus” on eBay, to eat in a café that advertises a “vaggie special”, or to accept the blandishments of a company whose mailshot mangles the spelling of your name.
Horobin recalls that Tony Blair, when prime minister, misspelt tomorrow three times in a single document. For fear lest Blair be mocked, spin doctors claimed that his “toomorrow” was not in fact an error but merely a quirk of his flamboyant penmanship. Inevitably, too, Horobin mentions Dan Quayle, the 44th vice-president of the United States and occasional purveyor of memorable gaffes. In 1992 Quayle was widely ridiculed for correcting a 12-year-old New Jersey schoolboy’s spelling of potato — “You’ve almost got it ... but it has an e on the end.” It was bad enough that Quayle didn’t know how to spell potato, yet his graver offence was amending the efforts of someone who did — an act that seemed a symptom of a larger misplaced confidence.
Having raised some nice questions about attitudes to correctness, Horobin then takes a different tack: he provides a solid history of English spelling, which highlights the role of enterprising individuals in shaping the standard. Some of these are well-known figures: Samuel Johnson, whose many interventions included drawing a distinction between council and counsel, and George Bernard Shaw, who claimed that “Shakespear [sic] might have written two or three more plays in the time it took him to spell his name with eleven letters instead of seven”. Less familiar is Richard Hodges, among whose attempts to make sense of the English spelling system was his 1644 book “The English Primrose”.
There’s plenty of interesting information here. Horobin identifies a book called “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” (1871) as the inspiration for the modern spelling bee — though he doesn’t mention that it was a novel, a sentimental effort by the Methodist pastor Edward Eggleston. He also notes that Chaucer is edited in a different way from other medieval authors: the text of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, written in the late-14th century, is today still printed using the now abandoned letters thorn and yogh, but Chaucer, who was writing at the same time, is printed without these archaic items. This has the slightly sneaky effect of making Chaucer look more accessible and modern.
While Horobin is a sane, sensible guide to such matters, he doesn’t probe the more philosophical aspects of the question he asks in the book’s title. Why do we feel we need an invariant system of orthography? The standard response is that consistency equals clarity; inconsistencies are distracting.
A different answer, of a kind that wouldn’t have been given 50 years ago, is that invariant spelling makes it easier to search through data that has been stored electronically. If I want to look for every instance of the word “change” in the online text of a speech by Barack Obama, it helps if “change” isn’t spelt five different ways.
The defenders of rigidly invariant spelling assert that it is a repository of authority and expressive elegance. The British linguist Mark Sebba has written acutely on this subject and is worth quoting at length: “We spell because orthography is part of the elaboration of our culture; because there is a natural tendency for all human activities which involve choice to take on social meaning; because literacy itself is embedded in and important to our culture and social actions, and orthography is essentially bound up with literacy.”
Yet not everyone feels that an ironclad standard of spelling is necessary. I have not encountered a British writer who has gone as far as Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist and Nobel laureate, who in the 1990s argued that “spelling should be pensioned off”, but many writers and artists are alive to the fertile possibilities of misspelling. Deliberately unconventional spelling can be a means of advertising one’s rebelliousness (“Nicccy woz ere”), marking one’s membership of a group, or making a name stand out — Krispy Kreme, Ludacris, “Inglourious Basterds”. It can have propitious consequences: Google and Ovaltine both owe their names to misspellings — of googol and Ovomaltine, respectively. And misspelling doesn’t necessarily prevent comprehension. Yu can undrestand tis. Und proberly allso vis.
To those who recoil from such wilful wonkiness, cyberspace can look an awful lot like the graveyard of spelling. In a trenchant final chapter, Horobin examines the way new technologies, among them the endlessly hyped Twitter, are leading us to communicate in a more casual style. He likens the condensed language of social media to the abbreviated forms employed by medieval scribes to speed up the process of making copies of texts, and observes that, until the 18th century, such elisions could be used without censure.
It is here that Horobin becomes vigorous. He engages with the claims of the English Spelling Society (formerly the Simplified Spelling Society), which has erroneously attributed the “messy” nature of English spelling to the sloppy efforts of the language’s earliest printers. He argues that reformers are often historically ignorant, alarmist and naive about diversity of pronunciation, as well as overconfident about the degree of warmth with which the public might embrace their mooted changes.
For Horobin, spelling matters — and, more to the point, our existing spelling matters. Spelling is commonly treated as if it is a tool, a technology which, at its best, creates a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters. But really it is a cultural achievement and a record of the language’s history.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
Henry Hitchings’s “Sorry! The English and Their Manners” is published by John Murray.
