The Simple Spellers

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

AN anæmic youth in horn goggles has called on me in the interests of the Simple Spellers. He shamelessly appropriated to himself and his cause two good hours of my time, seeking by processes which, for want of a better name, must pass for argumentation, to enlist me in his army. I suppose someone pays him for his time. I wish someone would pay me for mine; it was the best I had, and it is gone where I cannot recover it. And the gist of his shameless argument was that simplified spelling saves time!

He seemed to be obsessed with the naïve theory that we save time if we don’t spend it; whereas everyone who uses time knows that to spend it before it spends itself is the only way to save it. Accordingly I could get no real information from him as to whose time the simplification of spelling would save, or how. The idea seems to be that every time you write thru instead of through you save a second; and if you write it often enough, you might in the course of some years accumulate time enough for a vacation in Italy or an appendicitis operation. It appears to be based on the fatuous notion that time is money, and can be kept in the savings bank at compound interest till you need it. Suppose you write ten thousand simply spelled words a day, saving a second on each, or two hours and fortytwo minutes on the day’s work. Then you write for two hours and forty-two minutes and save three quarters of an hour more —and so on to infinity. It is subject to diminishing returns, but it goes on forever, and when you get down to split seconds you can take a fresh start. It is a beautiful theory, but it does n’t apply to me. I could never save time by writing thru; I should spend infinitely more time trying to remember to write it, and in hating it after I had written it, than I could save were it briefer than the very soul of wit.

I suppose I am an exception in that I am still old-fashioned enough to do my own writing; I am not yet incorporated and speeded up by means of multiple dictaphones and typists. If I were, I suppose I should get five cents a word no matter how they were spelled, and should be glad of simple spelling as a saving in ‘overhead.’ I should gloat over the thought that my stenographer, by using simple spelling (if she succeeded in learning it), would increase my profit by a hundred dollars a day. She might save time; a few of her would. But if I know anything about her, she would add it to her recreation periods, and devote it to gazing out of the window. So she will do, anyway. She will have her simple pleasures, nor need I purchase them for her at the cost of seeing my perfectly good English translated into the syncopations of Josh Billings or Ring Lardner.

But how about the children? Must their little minds be burdened with superfluous letters? or shall they be freed by an Emancipation Proclamation of the Simple Spellers? ‘If it were done when’t is done, then ’t were well it were done quickly.’ But I do not recall any burden of superfluous letters that weighed heavily on my infant mind. My observation tells me that there are two kinds of people, those who learn to spell, and those who do not; and neither kind worries about ‘meaningless combinations of letters’ — no one does that but the Simple Spellers. Indeed, I question whether learning to spell is a question of memorizing sequences of letters, any more than drawing is a matter of memorizing sequences of lines, curves, and angles. I do not believe that through is seven letters; it is a fact, like a maple leaf that I know when I see it, and with slight training I can draw it with my pencil. With pen or typewriter I make the symbol for the word by a series of reflex motions; I do not count the letters. If you ask me how I know through from though, I should probably mention the difference of the r, but the fact is I know them as I know Uncle Jim from Uncle Peter without consciousness of the distinguishing features. I know that is Uncle Jim because he looks like Uncle Jim; you need n’t simplify him on my account; I never burdened my mind with details in learning him.

Spelling is not a craft by itself: it is a part of writing and reading, training of eye and hand. When a boy writes starboard martyr for Stabat Mater, or forehead for forward, he writes what he hears; the fault is not with his ear, but with his visual image of the words. It means that he is not a reader, and is not accustomed to the appearance of the words. To try to teach him the distinctions by lists of letters alone would be about as useless as to try to teach him to distinguish people he never saw by means of verbal descriptions. I doubt if the one system is really easier to learn than the other. I am still to be convinced that the burden of our present system would be sufficiently lightened by the change to compensate anyone for the burden it would certainly be on a generation or two of children to have to learn both systems; and I see no security that the change could be made with less effort.

The Simple Speller has his answer ready. The gain would be in logicality, and to become more logical in any department of life is, he is assured, worth any sacrifice. I have no such assurance. To make spelling logical would be only the first step toward making language logical. Now logic is a good tool where it fits, but it does not fit every contingency of life. It is a good thing in language up to a certain point — which nobody has discovered. If it had been the ruling principle of language from the start, and if our splay-footed ancestors who first began to grunt with meaning could have looked down through the centuries and seen what they were letting us in for, language might have been logical, and we too. In that case we should probably have but one language in the world to-day, one of downright Prussian efficiency, fitted accurately to every service of life except that of imagination. Is that our ideal? If so we must change ourselves first; for if by a gesture of magic we could make our language overnight as logical as mathematics, how long would it stay so with our minds working as they do? The language of a people is like the skin of a man; as a rule, it fits snugly, and it is not often that we can better its fit by taking thought, except as by taking thought we better ourselves.

Indeed, the Simple Spellers are illadvised to seek more logic till they learn to use better what they have. The only arguments they have offered me are drawn from antecedent probability, which, if I remember my logic, is the weakest argument known, since it is built of inference before experience and buttressed with parabolic evidence. What we want to know about simplified spelling is whether it will simplify life for us and our children; what effect it would have on us as a nation; whether it is anything that would compensate us for the agony of the change. Why not look to those who have tried it? The Germans have simplified their spelling as far as a people could, and still use the old symbols. At this time it might be impossible to get a fair answer to the question what the effect of the system has been on the nation, how much time the people have saved by it, and how they have spent it. The French understand themselves pretty well; they have a fairly sure instinct for what they can and cannot make themselves do. In the Year One of the Age of Reason, which was 1792 by dead reckoning, they rationalized by fiat everything in France except human nature and spelling. Human nature then took its course, and before long everything was back where it was before, except for a few matters chiefly political.

Even so do spelling reforms come and go, leaving few traces. You can make a formal garden by rule and compass, but eternal vigilance and labor are the price of it; if you allow yourself the least interval of relaxation, the irregularities of nature will reassert themselves. Simple spelling cannot establish itself by decree, for it has no authority. It must win its place byconsent of the governed, and it has not a winning personality. So far it has not learned to smile. And if it has a scintilla of imagination, its sponsors would do well to let it show. I do not find simplified spelling useful; I know it isn’t beautiful; it isn’t even funny. Therefore, my word for it is that of the king to the harper: —