# American spelling. **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 23, 2001, 1:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-spelling/77716 "2001-08-23T13:49:49Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Another\_Primate](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f19dbf/32.png) [@Another\_Primate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Another_Primate)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2001, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-spelling/77716/21 "2001-09-30T17:53:31Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Sea Sorbust \* > \*\*… “Spell it as you say it,” would be the rule. > \*\* Two reasons against this: 1. It’s hard to read text with misspellings. I’ll be sailing along, and all of a sudden – my brain burps because of a misspelling. It breaks the flow. 2. It wouldn’t be fair to those of us who were careful to learn the rules! (Just kidding – if **that’s** a good reason for keeping the status quo, I’ll eat my hat.) But I think #1 is reason enough, anyhow. Oh, and speaking of breaking-the-reading-flow, may I rant for a few seconds about the shift-impaired? Yeah, I know that’s a phase many adolescent girls go through, because they think it’s cool. But, gimme a break – if you’re over 14, and still doing that, you’re just lazy. (And, yes, I’m just being selfish. It makes it so doggoned hard to read!) –Sue p.s. Whaddyawannabet I spell something incorrectly in this post? ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2001, 6:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-spelling/77716/22 "2001-09-30T18:01:44Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Larry Mudd \* > \*\* One of the major flaws of spelling reform is that it ties the spelling of a word _too closely_ to it’s pronunciation. > > Pronunciation is very fluid and varies considerably from generation to generation. If everything was spelled phonetically, written English would be undecipherable to most people after an interval of a couple of hundred years. (Think of how much easier it is to read Chaucer than to recite it.) > > If I were going to reform written language, I go in the other direction altogether, and completely divorce the written word from the pronunciation, in favour of an ideogrammatical renderering like Chinese. Because their written language is much more stable, most chinese people can read writing that is over two-thousand years old, although only a few scholars know anything about the old spoken dialects. Comparatively, most English speakers wouldn’t even recognize written English from 600 years ago as being their own language. Consequently, asian people have a better chance at a sense of historical continuity. > > That being said, I think that preserving the written word as we have it is the best option-- Usually, you can look at an unfamiliar word and determine its meaning by its spelling, without being misled by homophones: > If you say that someone is a _scholastic_, the spelling tells you that it has some connection to _school_, while someone enountering the word for the first time and relying on phonetic connections might assume that you are saying the person is a _bonehead._ 😉 \*\* But if we are taught from a young age to sound out words and, therefore, pronounce them as spelled, why should pronunciation change at all? It seems that if spelling and pronunciation were linked, pronunciation would become much less changeable. I think if a kind of Recieved Pronunciation was pounded into the heads of children beginning in, say, preschool as part of learning to spell, phonetic spelling would work just fine. (And dialects could be weeded out as misspellings! :)) ---
**Author:** ![Futile\_Gesture](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/f05b48/32.png) [@Futile\_Gesture](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Futile_Gesture)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2001, 5:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-spelling/77716/23 "2001-10-02T17:11:35Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Derleth \* > But if we are taught from a young age to sound out words and, therefore, pronounce them as spelled, why should pronunciation change at all? It seems that if spelling and pronunciation were linked, pronunciation would become much less changeable. I think if a kind of Recieved Pronunciation was pounded into the heads of children beginning in, say, preschool as part of learning to spell, phonetic spelling would work just fine. > > (And dialects could be weeded out as misspellings! :)) \*\* And why should we use Received Pronunciation? Why shouldn’t everyone be made to speak **my** way? After all, I speak properly and they don’t. Anyhow, this isn’t going to work. The only language that doesn’t have accents and dialects and an evolving pronunciation is a dead language. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2001, 8:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-spelling/77716/24 "2001-10-02T20:04:49Z")
Simplified speling is qiet lojical, but it’s not whut the OP was tauking about. I think the split between English and American speling hapend erlyer. ---
**Author:** ![Yue\_Han](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/eada6e/32.png) [@Yue\_Han](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yue_Han)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2001, 8:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-spelling/77716/25 "2001-10-02T20:15:46Z")
As Captain Amazing cleverly points out, one huge obstacle to spelling reform is that to the average American’s eye, it’s damn ugly. It looks like the way an uneducated person would write, or like gibberish. women:wimmin judge:juj Also, unreformed spelling carries contextual clues; for instance dogs:dogz cats:cats loses the common aspect of plurality between the two words for the sake of imitating how they are pronounced. Back to the OP, I’m pretty sure it was Webster. He got about 70% of his proposed reforms through, but the ramining 30% simply would not go down with the publicke, although people (like Roosevelt) tried to push them through again and again. Some of the same reforms caught on in Britain, but not all of them. –John ---
**Author:** ![TV\_time](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f17d59/32.png) [@TV\_time](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TV_time)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2001, 11:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-spelling/77716/26 "2001-10-02T23:34:07Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Larry Mudd \* > \*\* Spelling reform got a big boost from William Randolph Hearst in the 30’s. He was a big supporter and all of his papers used simplified spelling. He can be blamed for the general acceptance of “color” and “honor”, and the limited acceptance of “thru”. People couldn’t quite swallow things like “skool,” though. > > Personally, spelling reform advocates make me want to skreem. \*\* I tend to disagree with you **Larry** as an earlier member ( **Swede** ) posted, it was Colonel McCormick of the _Chicago Tribune_ that attempted to push such spellings as, "altho, tho, nite, rite and actually dropping the articles “a,” “an,” and “the” from the paper. If you look in their morgue you will see. This is in direction opposition to any Hearst paper which were quite traditional in spelling (most notably the _New York Journal_ and the _San Fancisco Examiner_). Look at their web pages. It is also mentioned in Bremner’s _Words on Words_ and Picketts _History of American Newspapers_. Historically I think you will find that both “color” and “honor” were in general acceptance well before Citizen Hearst. Once again check the archives of virtually any newspaper that existed around the American Civil War and you will see that virtually all references are the “American” spelling. It was in fact Webster that introduced these spellings (strongly encouraged by Ben Franklin, I might add) and the strong anti-British feeling at the time carried them into favor. Some words like “skool” apparently were too hard to take. (side note here: Franklin originally pushed for Latin as the official language for the new country he helped found.) (second side note: Checking around with my friends in the newspaper world, there is still one newspaper in the world that uses McCormick’s methods for spelling and article usage. It is the _Rocky Ford Daily Gazette_ in Rocky Ford, Colorado.) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-spelling/77716.md?page=1)