Everyone knows that George Bernard Shaw, a proponent of spelling reform, pointed out that “fish” can be spelled “ghoti.” Along with a lot of what everyone knows, it’s wrong. “Ghoti” does not appear in any of Shaw’s writings. So where does it come from? And why does it make some people mad? All the necessary research is making me hungry, so I’ll have to decide what to get when I go out for lunch—and how to spell it.
Continue reading →A wicked witch long ago cast a bad spell on the English language. Now there are hardly any common words that don’t rhyme with other words that have a very different spelling. Some people get confused. George Hearst, father of journalist William Randolph Hearst, ran for governor of California in 1882 despite having almost no education. In defense against the jeers of political rivals, he said, My opponents say that I haven’t the book learning that they possess. They say I can’t spell. They say I spell bird, b-u-r-d. If b-u-r-d doesn’t spell bird, what in the hell does it spell? “Burd,” by the way, used to mean “young woman” in Middle English (800 years ago). But how was Hearst to know? What would happen if all these rhyming words decided to trade endings? Would anyone be able to figure out what a sentence says? Can you? Try these.
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Oh come on. You know what a digm is. You probably have at least one in your pocket. It’s worth ten cents. It’s time for a paradime shift! Here are some sentences full of rhyming words that decided to trade endings. How quickly can you read them? Did Herman really bict his neighbor’s ear? A jury mite indight him. She was aglough that her boe had lots of deau, but full of wow when she saw he was sough shalloe.
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When I was first starting out in this writing business, I read a lot about how to make money from writing. One person in particular kept stressing over and over that writing online is a business, and must be taken seriously as a business. Great advice, but all of her articles were riddled with typos and simple grammatical errors. I tried to make allowances; English is not her first language. But then it wasn’t Vladimir Nabokov’s first language, either. Lolita may be a disgusting story, but he tells it with gorgeous prose. Perhaps you’re saying that his publisher provided a copy editor to catch and correct errors. And that brings up a big problem with writing online. There are no copy editors. We writers must either proofread carefully ourselves or get someone else to do it for us.
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People who like to read and write like words and like playing with words, sentences, punctuation, and anything else that comes along with reading and writing. Now that so many of us are BFF forever with our electronic gadgets, we have new tools for communicating—or failing to communicate, as the case may be. Word processing software now comes with spelling and grammar checkers. I expect most writers find them helpful, but they don’t make a very good crutch. For one thing, some of the grammar checkers contain hard-coded grammatical errors. And even if the suggested correction isn’t simply wrong, it might make hash of the meaning of the sentence. Spelling, or, software fails The spelling checker will bleed red all over people’s names, correctly spelled foreign words, brand names, and all kinds of things. On the other hand, just because a word is spelled correctly doesn’t mean that it’s the right word. I have had fun with that in my occasional series on “misused pears.” Years ago, a poem about spell checkers made the rounds of forwarded email. I just ran across a version of it again and love to share this kind of thing: I have a spelling checker, … Continue reading →