About the Perils of Spellcheck USA
It’s been a marvelous week. I’ve socialized with neighbors, been to the movie theater, enjoyed a savory pancake, visited a jewelry store, checked the car tires, and had a cozy night in with a glass of whiskey and some licorice treats while analyzing an interesting TV program.
And imagine the thrill of maneuvering the automobile next to the curb at the drive-thru Starbucks in the center of downtown and ordering a decaf skinny latte – a bit of a favorite drink in these parts.
I thought of Scotland and the likelihood that the snow plows would soon be out; the specter of a long cold winter forcing people to wrap up in their woolens and go to bed in their warmest pajamas, perhaps fortified by several whiskeys.
And don’t mention aluminum, mustache, skeptic, paying by check, the hospital’s pediatric unit, a marriage guidance counselor, and the skillful players on the Arizona Cardinals defense (with the emphasis on the first ‘e’)
My non-US friends will see exactly where I’m coming from here. As someone who writes for a living, I now have to adjust from the spelling regime I learned in primary school to a system that is different in many key respects and, to the eyes of an immigrant Scotsman, just looks wrong.
To make matters worse there are inconsistencies galore over here. Meagre becomes meager but massacre remains massacre; civilise is civilize but surprise is still surprise; pretence becomes pretense but license stays as license.
I have no problem at all with the terminology in the US being different from the UK. After all there are thousands of great “dialect words” throughout Scotland that enrich the language. And I find it quite fun to call a tap a faucet, a pavement a sidewalk, a car boot a trunk and a car park a parking lot. Hell, I’m even beginning to say zee instead of zed. Well…I’ll be darned, I must be going native.
But I had always believed that there was a correct and an incorrect way of spelling and that it was clearly set out in any good English dictionary. It was drummed into us in school that spelling – orthography as one of my old teachers used to say – was an art and set in stone; we had very strict spelling tests and were belted for repeated failures.
So why have Americans changed it so drastically? Do they want to be different, or feel superior, or divorce themselves as much as possible from their old colonial masters? Are they wrong in spelling certain “English” words the way they do? No other English-speaking country such as Canada, Australia or New Zealand deviates quite as much as the US.
It turns out there is one man to blame for this – a certain Noah Webster whose name lives on in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. He was a linguistic revolutionary in the 18th and 19th centuries and believed that the US, as a new nation, should “assert cultural independence” from Britain through language.
He proposed far more extreme spelling changes than were accepted. He wanted phonetic spellings – wimmin for women, tung for tongue. The publication of the final version of his dictionary in the 1820s is the reason Americans spell the way they do.
Of course we just have to look at a document from the days of Olde England to realise that spelling has evolved over the centuries. But the bottom line from my point of view is that, thanks to Noah Webster, my working life is now more of a pain in the butt than ever.
In the meantime I’ll carry on typing and let my new American spellcheck do the rest.