Wi yew kant spel gud

I have a spelling checker,

It came with my PC.

It plane lee marks four my revue

Miss steaks aye can knot sea.

We iz tryin hart.

Why, for centuries, have people struggled to spell? Because English spelling is horribly hard, Michael Skapinker writes in The Financial Times.

It is not just that we have “for” and “four”, “stake”, “steak” and “mistake”. We also have “peak”, “peek” and “pique”. “Horrid” has a double consonant in the middle, “timid” a single one. “Prefer” has one “f”, “proffer” two.

Misspelling is not a modern malady, Skapinker writes.

In Spell it Out, David Crystal reproduces a 1910 cartoon from Punch magazine in which a boss berates his secretary for typing “income” as “incum”. “Good Heavens!” exclaims the secretary. “How did I come to leave out the ‘b’?” And in 1750 Lord Chesterfield, the statesman, advising his son to brush up on his spelling, warned: “I know a man of quality, who never recovered the ridicule of having spelled ‘wholesome’ without the ‘w’.”

Why is English spelling such a tangle?

It all started when Latin-speaking missionaries arrived in Britain in the 6th century without enough letters in their alphabet. They had 23. (They didn’t have “j”, “u” or “w”.) Yet the Germanic Anglo-Saxon languages had at least 37 phonemes, or distinctive sounds. The Romans didn’t have a letter, for example, for the Anglo-Saxon sound we spell “th”. The problem continues. Most English-speakers today have, depending on their accents, 40 phonemes, which we have to render using 26 letters. So, we use stratagems such as doubling vowels to elongate them, as in “feet” and “fool”. 

With the Norman invasion in 1066, spelling became more complicated still; French and Latin words rushed into the language. As the centuries went by, scribes found ways of reflecting the sounds people used with the letters that they had. They lengthened vowels by adding a final “e”, so that we could tell “hope” from “hop”.

Read more of this sad, sad history here.

Spelling, anyone?

In 2006, the New York City Department of Education made a mistake in their bookkeeping.  Apparently, there was a misspelling that had a word with one extra letter.  This word was not readable by their accounting system and, somehow, that system decided to therefore spend twice as much on transportation.  That year, $2.8 million was spent instead of the budgeted $1.4 million. The city had to come up with the money to replace it.

-- A Whole Lot of Nothing

No heterography here

Here, from Dr. Goodword, is a word about words.

heterography / he-têr-ah-grê-fi / noun

1. A nonphonetic or inconsistent spelling system: the use of the same letter to convey different sounds (as the C in city and candy) or different letters to express the same sound, as spelling the sound [s] C in city and S in sea.
2. An aberrant or unusual spelling, as m-i-l-c-h for milk or l-y-t-h-e for lithe.

Look out, here comes another big word. The good doctor:

The spelling system of a language is its orthography, Greek for "correct or true writing". The trueness of writing systems varies greatly and English orthography is dismally heterograpic, to use the adjective for heterography. Be sure to reassure your children, as they learn how to spell English words, that their difficulty is not their fault.

Heterographically speaking, in other words, English is a world leader. Many nations periodically introduce spelling reforms that update the spelling systems of their languages: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Netherlands, Portugal, and Brazil have been adjusting the spelling in their languages at the turn of the 21st century. English, however, is spoken by large populations in several different countries (Australia, Britain, Canada, India, New Zealand, the US, and South Africa), so agreement on any change is highly unlikely.

History: Heterography is a fairly recent combining of heteros "different, the other of two" + graph- "write" + ia, a noun suffix. The root graph- has a fascinating family history. The patriarch of this family is PIE *gerbh- "to scratch". In the Germanic languages it underwent metathesis, switching the position of the [e] and the [r], leading to English crab, a beast that can deliver an excellent scratch. As the rules of scratching were honed into languages, the same stem produced the stem of grammar.

Leader of the pact

Stanley Bing, the hilarious columnist who writes on life at work, answers a reader:

Dear Stanley,

I work for the largest bank in the world, and like all things it has its ups and downs. What strategies can I use to effectively “manage up”? I am hoping to differentiate myself from the pact, and my hard work seems to go unnoticed. Signed,

Ambitious

Dear Ambitious,

Well, you can start by learning to spell. I don’t mean to be unkind or rude, but there you have it. You won’t differentiate yourself from the “pact,” my friend, unless you are negotiating an international agreement of some sort. You will, however, differentiate yourself from the pack if you use language right and spell things correctly. Okay, there may be parts of the business world where spelling and grammar don’t count, and perhaps banking is one of them. But I don’t think so. I can’t tell you how many times, in spite of all my best intentions, I develop a slightly more negative opinion about somebody because they write me an e-mail that says, “Stan, your right.” I also have no particular affection for the dreaded “Him and me are going to call you about that.” What can I tell you? I’m a grammar and spelling police officer. I’m also a boss. If you want to manage me, you have to speak my language. Or any language. That’s a good beginning.