The joy of English spelling

To learn pronunciation from a dictionary, you have to learn a separate alphabet, the IPA. It's not fun.

Since the world we live in is strange and unfathomably difficult to comprehend, it seems proper that English, once confined to a barabric, rain-sodden people of northern climes, should rise to the status of lingua franca and make life infernal for the hundreds of millions of students who attempt to learn it as a foreign or secondary language.

And since language seems to raise the passions of people almost as much as religion or sport, it’s often a subject best left to those who love composing screeching rants to newspaper editors.

English spelling is, at best, laughable

You cannot escape the fact that English spelling is at best, retarded. French spelling is possibly even more so, though as current French politics relegate la langue francaise to the neophytes of religious bigotry and sour grapes, English is set to reign supreme for a while yet. For English speakers who happen to speak another language, one of the most startling revelations about our own language is its almost arbitrary spelling. And while I could wax lyrical about how easy it is to learn Turkish spelling conventions or the almost child-like orthography of Castilian, I’ll attract too much hate mail and virus-laden spam. This will make me tired.

English spelling conventions are an approximate visual representation of the spoken word. And often, of the spoken word as it was uttered several hundred years ago. Even without delving into a dissertation on historical linguistics, it doesn’t take much to conclude that when ‘enough’ was written for the first time, it pretty much didn’t sound like the word as we pronounce if today. Otherwise, common sense would have dictated ‘inuff’, or else something close to it. The ridiculousness of English spelling is easily apparent from a lesson my tortured English teacher once gave in high school, where he scrawled ‘bough’, ‘rough’, ‘through’ and ‘ought’ onto the board to enlighten us a little further on the capriciousness of our orthography. He never did explain how things got that messed up, but he was like that.

How to spell correctly and influence people

So here is a very short list of suggestions for those who really want to discover the path to spell English words ‘correctly’.

Decide on American or English spelling. Your words, your choice. Don’t let anyone persuade you otherwise. Like your football team, make the choice and then stick with it for life.

Secondly, purchase a big, fat dictionary, one that you’ll be proud to own and that you’ll keep as a handy reference book. A big, fat dictionary might be either the Oxford English or the Longmann American. I have both and I worship them equally.

Thirdly, a search on Google cannot help you spell with great certainty. That compound adjective or doubled-up vowel for which you seek clarification online will be spelled with a great deal of variety by a large number of people. One dictionary, one reference. Stick with it.

Next, a word processing spellchecker can facilitate your task but it cannot replace your big, fat dictionary. Not yet, and not for a while longer. When it does, I’m out of a job.

Further, never listen to anyone who states that such-and-such is the only correct spelling. The person is most likely an extremist, and quite frankly, we need to educate these types before the twenty-first century breeds more of them and spells the end of civilisation (love my pun).

Love your English, whatever it may be

Lastly, don’t be too precious about spelling. Just be consistent. My good friend is a talented designer, by nature is an accommodating and sensitive soul. Her online jewellery site contains a post on ‘Jewelry versus Jewellery‘. Since she sells fabulous creations online and across the world, Simone is smart enough to know that people might pass judgement on here site if they visit, say, the British English site from North America. She has it sorted.

It will already be evident if you’ve read this far that I do not use American English anywhere on my website. My choice. And though I suggest you own one big, fat dictionary, I possess 42 of them, in all shapes and sizes, colour and hues. They are my tools and that’s what I spend my day doing. Making sure that the spelling and grammar in a document are consistent and understandable to the greatest number of any given audience.

To finish, I do love the French. I’m just frustrated with the current course of events, where the government is taking a course against a significant portion of it own population. Dismal, really. But that’s for another post.