Text messaging challenge to tyranny of spelling
Simon Jenkins
The texting generation may yet realise George Bernard Shaw's dream of liberating the English language for all of us.
· In Shakespeare's day, authors conveyed the clearest of messages with random spelling, even of the Bard's name
· English adapts its vocabulary to circumstance, but has no way of adapting its spelling
· Texting could finally spur a revolution
· It is the shorthand of the computer age
THANK YOU, Scotland. First John Knox, then the Enlightenment, and now the Scottish Qualifications Authority. In a direct challenge to the English at their most reactionary, the authority has declared that it will accept text-messaging short forms in school examinations. The dark riders of archaism will protest and the backwoods will howl. No spell is cast as dire as spellcheck. But the champions of reason are massing north of the border and need our support.
It is plain silly to regard doughnut as "better" than donut. The same goes for alternatives to night, through, colour, and wholesome. When the great Noah Webster invented American spelling after independence, he left British English immured in bigotry. He chided "even well-bred people and scholars for surrendering their right of private judgment to literary governors." To Americans, spelling reform was the sovereignty of common sense. For that reason the British treated it as foreign, vulgar, and, worst of all, American.
I have no fight with grammatical authoritarianism. Grammar is a vehicle that needs a highway code of human communication. To parse is to prosper. Grammar reflects the new uses that language requires of it, as dictionaries include new words. Adverbs and adjectives fight the good fight against poverty-stricken nouns and verbs. Prepositions and conjunctions are hurled into the fray. A controversial time is had by all.
A no-go area
In contrast, spelling has become a no-go area, an intellectual tundra. While plain writing is considered a stylistic virtue, plain spelling is a vice. English orthography is an edifice of unreason. Word endings are the last gasp of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman invasions, embedded in the cultural DNA of literary Brahmins. Not to spell properly is a sign of being common, as once was the ignorance of Latin. Knowing your "ie" from "ei" or -ible from -able does not affect a word's meaning one jot. It is a caste mark, its distinction deriving from its very obscurity.
Across the globe, students of English are driven to distraction by its spelling. Britons ridicule the French for their rule-based language, but at least they have a scholarly academy to discuss and approve (or resist) reform. While English adapts its vocabulary to circumstance, it has no way of adapting its spelling. Every time I write cough, bough, through, and thorough (not to mention write), I think of the teeming millions of students who ask their teachers: why? There is no answer. I suggest they learn American English instead.
The dogmatism of English orthography is a bond of lexicological freemasonry, a conspiracy against the laity. George Orwell rightly associated such dogma with totalitarianism. Wrong is right, as in war is peace. In Shakespeare's day, authors conveyed the clearest of messages with random spelling, even of Shakespeare's own name. As David Crystal says in The Fight for English, not until the 18th century was Chesterfield able to chastise his son on his poor spelling, warning that "I know a man of quality who never recovered the ridicule of having spelled wholesome without the w."
Orthographical purity is perpetually under strain. Mr. Crystal estimates that the Oxford dictionary gives alternative spellings for some 25 per cent of words at some time in history. "Hence the notion of standard spelling needs to be taken with a huge pinch of salt." Yet propose that Britain should spell colour without a "u" and it is like burning the flag. In 1992, The Guardian reported a Gallup poll suggesting that only one in six adults could spell accommodation, business, height, necessary, separate, and sincerely; 10 per cent got them all wrong. This was considered a shocking example of public illiteracy. In truth it was a comment on the archaism of the spellings. Italians would not consider such a poll worth holding.
Stuck in the past
When George Bernard Shaw, leading champion of a simplified alphabet (or alfabet) was censored for writing shant, he asked why shan't and not the more accurate sha'n't. He said of most apostrophes, "There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli." He was right in claiming that archaic spellings were maintained to keep the poor illiterate, but wrong to think that they would impede the spread of English as a world language. Spelling is the last fig leaf of empire, the last bastion of nanny (or Lynne Truss) knows best. It is stuck in the tramlines of the past, and nobody thinks straight on the subject.
Reform has seen many false dawns. Some hoped for a breakthrough with the telegram. But by charging for words, not characters, the Post Office dropped this pass. Isaac Pitman created a new English script with shorthand, but its boycott by teachers and restriction to a servile class of secretaries and journalists stamped it as a manual skill. The same applied to stenography.
Another opportunity came with the qwerty keyboard. Designed to avoid the jamming of mechanical arms, it was a golden opportunity for simplified spelling. Yet even when electronic keyboards ended the jamming problem, nobody thought to reform the qwerty layout or spelling with it. I am told Mandarin can be transmitted faster, by a skilled operator, than Roman script with English spellings.
Most English words are twice as long as they need to be, staggering under a weight of unvoiced vowels and consonants surplus to requirements. Computer users may be hard-wired to qwerty, but millions still plod across the keyboard searching with single-finger typing. Thousands are disabled by repetitive stress injuries.
Can texting finally spur revolution? Young people have evolved both a new script and a cost-effective reason for using it. They are breaking free of spelling dogma and expanding the alphabet with emoticons. Texting is the shorthand of the computer age. It is concise, cutting through the verbal jargon by which the professional classes seek to exclude the less educated. The Txtr's A-Z, a dictionary compiled by Andrew John, points out that mobile texting literally puts a price on waffle, while "ingenious abbreviations have been contrived to capture a vaguely philosophical thought, a loving sentiment or a beautifully crafted obscenity." He describes what is a chaotic literary pidgin.
The Scottish examiners are adamant that they are not rewarding text spelling, since there will be no marks for it, only for accuracy of meaning. Pupils will be credited for quoting "2b or not 2b" but will get higher marks if they spell it conventionally. That they should be penalised for an offence that Shakespeare himself committed is strange. Surely pupils are saving paper and helping examiners by their brevity. But all change must start somewhere.
Shaw left the British Museum a legacy for the promotion of spelling reform, a legacy which the museum stole after a case of Jarndyce obscurity in the court of chancery in 1957. To make amends the British Library should now summon a conference in Shaw's name of lexicographers and writers to declare a thousand English spellings archaic and thousands more as common usage, including texting short forms. If not, the world will pass on and the nation's young will reform English spelling on their own. Already a million fingers are tapping out a revolution. The Scots are showing the way.
(Source: The Hindu)
