For Some, Spelling Is A Scourge
A couple of days ago, I commented about the National Spelling Bee and the pleasure some get from having to spell esoteric words whose letters and pronunciation seem to have little, if any, discernible relationship.
Now it seems appropriate to mention their opposite number who, while not in the auditorium, were nevertheless on the scene. They took the form of a tiny group of activists who gathered outside the National Spelling Bee. Their goal: phonetic spelling.
The protesters, not unreasonably, believe English spelling is mired by too many difficulties. If they got their way, "you" would become "yoo," "believe" would become "beleev" and "said" would become "sed."
This is by no means a new battle. Many decades back, George Bernard Shaw, the renowned Irish playwright who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, made the same point--in dramatic fashion--when he took the word fish and justified spelling it as ghoti. He explained that he took the gh sound as f from the word enough, the o sound as i from the word women, and the ti sound as sh from the word nation.
The protesters claim that the cost of clinging to traditional spellings is millions of illiterate English speakers who struggle to read signs or get good jobs, and billions of dollars in lost productivity. Interestingly, technology may do what years of intellectual arguments have failed to do. Specifically, with instant messaging, kids are bringing phonetic spelling center stage. This is in keeping with how language operates.Once people begin to use language in certain ways, those ways take hold--no matter what the "official rules" say. So, It will be interesting to see how this plays out in writing in the years ahead.
