Spelling and Such

When I was in the first grade, my family moved from Massachusetts to Georgia. It was quite a change, but for most children, change is easy to deal with. Children seem to have a greater ability to adapt than adults, probably because they have not yet learned to fear change like many adults. Children innately accept change as the only consistent aspect of life. So I acclimated to Georgia quickly. It didn't hurt, though, that we brought the snow with us that year. The Great Blizzard o' '93, as it is recorded in the annals, hit Georgia just weeks after we arrived.

Before long I was saying y'all and drinking sweet tea, but there was one thing that I never absorbed, and I still haven't. It is a particular word, which I discovered one day when I volunteered to read a paragraph out loud in school:

"'Jimmy went to school. He liked it there. It was fun. His mother asked him, 'Do you like school Jimmy?' 'Yes Maw-Am, I do.'"

Apparently Jimmy was funny, so I started laughing along with my classmates, even though I didn't get it. Then my teacher informed me that the word spelled "ma'am" was pronounced "mam." What kind of messed up phonetic world was this anyway? I never read aloud again - ever - and I am extremely shy to this day as a result of my tragic ma'am experience. Just ask around.

One of the problems with being a reader is that we often learn what a word means and associate it with whatever we believe to be its pronunciation, even if that pronunciation is wrong. My sister, for instance, likes to tell the story of how for years she believed the word "laughter" to be pronounced "lotter," rhyming with "hotter." There are many examples of this principle, and some that you may not have realized yourself.

For instance, Goethe, the Shakespeare of Germany, is not "go-eth" but rather "Ger-tuh." The word "draught," while common in England, is currently underlined by my spell-checker as a misspelled word, and following the principle of "laughter," is pronounced "draft," not "drawt." I did not realize this myself until recently, and based on a small survey I conducted, many others do not know either. Then there's "victuals," pronounced "vittles," as in "Get some vittles and roast them on the far - I'm cold and hungry!" Until yesterday, when I saw the word printed for the first time that I can remember, I would have spelled "roughage" as "ruffage" had I written it myself, and probably would have pronounced "roughage" as "roo-age," were its meaning not so evident in the book I was reading. I also recall thinking "epitome" was "epi-tome" not "ep-pit-oh-me," though I knew what the word "ep-pit-oh-me" meant when spoken.

There are many other words whose pronunciations should be obvious but which are constantly mispronounced. There is no "x" in "essssssspresso." (That is, by the way, how it was originally spelt, to emphasize the sound of steaming water.) There is an "r" after the "b" in February. And, again with the "x," it is "et cetera," not "ex cetera." I'm sure the first "r" in February will eventually go away, in a few hundred years perhaps, since it is never used. That which is not used is thrown away.

Sometimes in English we have actually kept the old and new versions of a word, though. For instance, the word "amicable" means friendly; so does the word "amiable." And in fact, they are the same word historically. Somewhere along the way, a group of folks stopped using the "c" in "amicable," either from laziness or forgetfulness or both. But I suppose another group liked the "c," so both words came to us in English, though they come from precisely the same word amicabilis, "friendly" in Latin. Curious, isn't it? We like our choices in English.

Whenever I come across examples like this one, I reflect that spelling really should not be as strict as it is. We permit both amiable and amicable, despite the fact that they are the same word, so why not permit both February and Febuary, espresso and expresso, and so on? In Middle English especially (Chaucer's era), they took this view. Words were speld however the auther felt lyke spellyng them, or however best reflekted the pronuntsiashun. Good times.

I like diversity in spelling; it keeps life interesting, whether the different spellings are "correct" or not. It's funny - not a single word in the previous paragraph is underlined in my spell-checker even though "draught" was (and still is) underlined. You may think it's a glitch; I think its a sign.

With ridiculously spelled text messages and quick emails overtaking other forms of communication, we are sure to see some funny spelling changes in the next few centuries. If we're lucky, pronunciations will change along with them. Then when we are unfrozen from our cryogenic freezers in 2513, we will all have a good laugh over the way people communicate, unless, of course, we are still afraid of change. I'm sure the kids will love it.