Archived Editorial for 03/26/06

The Cents of Spelling
by Rebecca Brown

Caution: intentional misspelling & playfully erogenous words!

I've always had a soft spot for dear old Spooner -- he who “sewed you to your sheets”, & while those slips of the tongue generally simulate a giggel or too, rung spelling sticks out like the proverbail “Tom Thumb”, or -- & does this ever date me! -- a “ladder/run” in your stocking/hoes!

Recently, I was merrily reading along in a novel by a “New York Times Bestelling Author” when I came upon the word “quite” -- so what's the problem? The entire sentence was about silence. It stopped me like an uneven edge to a sidewalk. All of a sudden my momentum was tripped up & the story gone. & it is by no means the first time such an error has snuck past the beagle eyes of top publishers.

When the fabrics from South American cultures started showing up at the food co-ops in Berkeley, California, I noticed there was always one error. Upon researching this I found that the weavers always make that “missteak” in their wears, just to remind everyone that they're not dogs.

Is it reasonable then that writers & readers should expect their editors & proofreaders to be almightily infallible? Does intention change the quality of an error?

Then again, I've been finding a few wrong words, as in “than” instead of “then” & Malapropisms, as in fire “distinguisher” for “extinguisher”. Perhaps the best known & much-beloved modern Mr. Malaprop is Yogi Berra: “we made too many wrong mistakes.”

Why does the odd spelling error or the wrong word matter? Because they garble any cents the authors intended, & set their readers wandering what's going on, thus detracting(this is debatable -- could also have been distracting) from the story. Here endeth my intentional errors!

orthography
1) a : the art of writing words with the proper letters according to standard usage
b : the representation of the sounds of a language by written or printed symbols
2 : a part of language study that deals with letters & spelling.

In the English language, (& purists will quibble about that!) we've had a couple of chaps who've been so entranced by the written & spoken word that they've actually amassed dictionaries -- the first to be published was in England in 1755 by the venerable author & lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709-84).

Seventy years later, across The Pond in the erstwhile “Colonies”, Noah Webster published his American Dictionary of the English Language.

Born in West Division of Hartford, Connecticut three years after Samuel Johnson's dictionary was published, Noah Webster grew up at a time when Americans from different states could barely understand each other -- Vermonters spoke French, New Yorkers spoke Dutch, & the settlers in Pennsylvania spoke German, while everyone else chatted along in all sorts of English dialects.

Webster had hated his time in schools where as many as 70 students, of all ages, were crammed into one-room schoolhouses with untrained teachers, no desks, with books that came from England. He thought Americans should learn from American books, so in 1783 at the age of 27, he published his own textbook: A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, which, because of its cover most people called the The Blue Back Speller. For over a century, it was to teach American children how to read, spell, & pronounce words. It soon was selling a million copies a year, & its royalty of less than one cent per copy was enough to sustain Webster in his other endeavors. Even such a luminary as Ben Franklin used The Blue Back Speller to teach his granddaughter to read.

Six years later, Noah Webster & Rebecca Greenleaf were married. They were to have eight children, & everywhere this father went he'd carry raisins & candies in his pockets. The family moved to Amherst, Massachusetts where Webster helped start Amherst College before moving on to New Haven. In the 1780's Noah Webster was an outspoken Anti-federalist, & his writings were influential in the origin of the Bill of Rights. In December of 1793 he founded New York's first daily newspaper the American Minerva which later changed to The Commercial Advertiser. He also published, semi-weekly, The Herald which later became The New York Spectator.

By 1806, Webster had published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, the first truly American dictionary. He immediately went to work on his magnum opus, An American Dictionary of the English Language (one original can be purchased at Amazon for the astonishing price of US$2,474.99.). To accomplish this he learned 26 languages, including Anglo-Saxon & Sanskrit, & traveled to Paris, France & to the University of Cambridge in England. After 22 years of labor, it was finally published it in 1825 with 70,000 entries, offering a new standard of lexicography, far surpassing Samuel Johnson's masterpiece both in scope & authority.

One facet of Webster's importance was his willingness to innovate when he thought it meant improvement. He was the first to document distinctively American vocabulary such as “skunk”, “hickory”, “squash” & “chowder”. Reasoning that many spelling conventions were artificial & needlessly confusing, he urged altering such word as musick to music, colour to color, centre to center, & plough to plow. (Others met with less acceptance such as modifying tongue to tung & women to wimmen -— the latter he argued was “the old and true spelling” -- wouldn't he have loved it when, 150 years later, Feminists took up that spelling!)

Webster's dictionary had the result he intended: his standardized spelling & pronunciation guides helped ensure that Americans who speak English speak more or less the same English.

In 1831, as Webster was promoting his dictionary, George & Charles Merriam opened a printing & bookselling operation in Springfield, Massachusetts. G. & C. Merriam Co. (renamed Merriam-Webster Inc. in 1982) inherited the Webster legacy when the Merriam brothers bought the unsold copies of the 1841 edition of An American Dictionary of the English Language, Corrected and Enlarged from Webster's heirs. At the same time they secured the rights to create revised editions of that work. It was the beginning of a publishing tradition that has continued uninterrupted to this day.

Besides creating that dictionary & publishing Noah Webster's Advice to the Young & The American Spelling Book: Containing the Rudiments of the English Language for the Use of Schools in the United States, he worked tirelessly to gain uniform copyright laws, in part to stop the unauthorized printing of his books. A federal copyright law was successfully passed in 1790.

When he died in 1843 he was considered an American hero.

All thanks to: www.m-w.com

The goodies below remind me of Eats, Shoots & Leaves by bad punctuation's arch-enemy Lynne Truss:

In a rest room: TOILET OUT OF ORDER PLEASE USE FLOOR BELOW
In a Laundromat: AUTOMATIC WASHING MACHINES PLEASE REMOVE ALL YOUR CLOTHES WHEN LIGHT GOES OUT
In a London department store: BARGAIN BASEMENT UPSTAIRS
In an office: WOULD THE PERSON WHO TOOK THE STEP LADDER PLEASE BRING IT BACK OR FURTHER STEPS WILL BE TAKEN
AFTER TEA BREAK STAFF SHOULD EMPTY THE TEAPOT AND STAND UPSIDE DOWN ON THE DRAINING BOARD
Outside a secondhand shop: WE EXCHANGE ANYTHING - BICYCLES, WASHING MACHINES, ETC WHY NOT BRING YOUR WIFE ALONG AND GET A WONDERFUL BARGAIN?
Notice in health food store window: CLOSED DUE TO ILLNESS
Spotted in a safari park: ELEPHANTS PLEASE STAY IN YOUR CAR
Seen during a conference: FOR ANYONE WHO HAS CHILDREN AND DOESN'T KNOW IT THERE IS DAY CARE
Notice in a field: THE FARMER ALLOWS WALKERS TO CROSS FOR FREE BUT THE BULL CHARGES
Message on a pamphlet: IF YOU CANNOT READ THIS LEAFLET WILL TELL YOU HOW TO GET LESSONS
On a shop door: WE CAN REPAIR ANYTHING - PLEASE KNOCK HARD BELL OUT OF ORDER

Rebecca