How to Spell a Word

The spelling of English words is archaic, it’s confusing, it’s needlessly complicated, and, if you have a sense of humor, it’s downright comical. In fact, any insulting epithet you might wish to level against our weird methods of putting letters together to form words would probably be justified—but it’s our spelling, and we’re stuck with it.

How completely stuck we are is illustrated by a somewhat ludicrous event that goes back to 1906, and that cost philanthropist Andrew Carnegie $75,000.

Working under a five-year grant of funds from Carnegie, and headed by the esteemed scholar Brander Matthews, the Simplified Spelling Board published in that year a number of recommendations for bringing some small semblance of order out of the great chaos of English spelling. Their suggestions affected a mere three hundred words out of the half million then in the language. Here are a few examples, to give you a general idea:

These revisions seemed eminently sensible to no less a personage than the then President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt. So delighted was he with the new garb in which these three hundred words could be clothed that he immediately ordered that all government documents be printed in simplified spelling. And the result? Such a howl went up from the good citizens of the republic, from the nation’s editors and schoolteachers and businessmen, that the issue was finally debated in the halls of Congress. Almost to a man, senators and representatives stood opposed to the plan. Teddy Roosevelt, as you have doubtless heard, was a stubborn fellow—but when Congress threatened to hold up the White House stationery appropriation unless the President backed down, Teddy rescinded the order. Roosevelt ran for re-election some time later, and lost. That his attitude toward spelling contributed to his defeat is of course highly doubtful—nevertheless an opposition New York newspaper, the day the returns were in, maliciously commented on the outgoing incumbent in a one-word simplified-spelling editorial: “THRU!”

Roosevelt was not the first President to be justifiably outraged by our ridiculous orthography. Over a hundred years ago, when Andrew Jackson was twitted on his poor spelling, he is supposed to have made this characteristic reply, “Well, sir, it is a damned poor mind that cannot think of more than one way to spell a word!” And according to one apocryphal version, it was Jackson’s odd spelling that gave birth to the expression “okay.” Jackson thought, so goes the story, that “all correct” was spelled “orl korrect,” and he used O.K. as the abbreviation for these words when he approved state papers.

Many years ago, the British playwright George Bernard Shaw offered a dramatic proposal for reducing England’s taxes. Just eliminate unnecessary letters from our unwieldy spelling, he said, and you’ll save enough money in paper and printing to cut everyone’s tax rate in half. Maybe it would work, but it’s never been put to the test—and the way things look now, it never will be. Current practice more and more holds spelling exactly where it is, bad though it may be. It is a scientific law of language that if enough people make a “mistake,” the “mistake” becomes acceptable usage. That law applies to pronunciation, to grammar, to word meanings, but not to spelling. Maybe it’s because of our misbegotten faith in, and worship of, the printed word—maybe it’s because written language tends to be static, while spoken language constantly changes. Whatever the cause, spelling today successfully resists every logical effort at reform. “English spelling,” said Thorstein Veblen, “satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective.” Perfectly true. Notwithstanding, it’s here to stay.

Your most erudite friend doubtless misspells the name of the Hawaiian guitar. I asked half a dozen members of the English department of a large college to spell the word—without exception they responded with ukelele. Yet the only accepted form is ukulele.

Judging from my experience with my classes at Rio Hondo College, half the population of the country must think the word is spelled alright. Seventy-five per cent of the members of my classes can’t spell embarrassing or coolly. People will go on misspelling these four words, but the authorized spellings will remain impervious to change.

Well, you know the one about Mohammed and the mountain. Though it’s true that we have modernized spelling to a microscopic extent in the last eighty years (traveler, center, theater, medieval, labor, and honor, for example, have pretty much replaced traveller, centre, theatre, mediaeval, labour, and honour), still the resistance to change has not observably weakened. If spelling won’t change, as it probably won’t, those of us who consider ourselves poor spellers will have to. We’ll just have to get up and go to the mountain.

Is it hard to become a good speller? I have demonstrated over and over again in my classes that anyone of normal intelligence and average educational background can become a good speller in very little time.

What makes the task so easy?

First—investigations have proved that 95 per cent of the spelling errors that educated people make occur in just one hundred words. Not only do we all misspell the same words—but we misspell them in about the same way.

Second—correct spelling relies exclusively on memory, and the most effective way to train memory is by means of association or, to use the technical term, mnemonics.

If you fancy yourself an imperfect or even a terrible speller, the chances are very great that you’ve developed a complex solely because you misspell some or all of the hundred words with which this Intermission deals. When you have conquered this single list, and I shall immediately proceed to demonstrate how easy it is, by means of mnemonics, to do so, 95 per cent of your spelling difficulties will in all likelihood vanish.

Let us start with twenty-five words from the list. In the first column you will find the correct spelling of each, and in the second column the simple mnemonic that will forevermore fix that correct spelling in your memory.

Whether or not you have much faith in your spelling ability, you will need very little time to conquer the preceding twenty-five demons. Spend a few minutes, now, on each of those words in the list that you’re doubtful of, and then test your success by means of the exercise below. Perhaps to your astonishment, you will find it easy to make a high score.

Mere repetitious drill is of no value in learning to spell a word correctly. You’ve probably heard the one about the youngster who was kept after school because he was in the habit of using the ungrammatical expression “I have went.” Miss X was going to cure her pupil, even if it required drastic measures. So she ordered him to write “I have gone” one thousand times. “Just leave your work on my desk before you go home,” she said, “and I’ll find it when I come in tomorrow morning.” Well, there were twenty pages of neat script on her desk next morning, one thousand lines of “I have gone’s,” and on the last sheet was a note from the child. “Dear Teacher,” it read, “I have done the work and I have went home.” If this didn’t actually happen, it logically could have, for in any drill, if the mind is not actively engaged, no learning will result. If you drive a car, or sew, or do any familiar and repetitious manual work, you know how your hands can carry on an accustomed task while your mind is far away. And if you hope to learn to spell by filling pages with a word, stop wasting your time. All you’ll get for your trouble is writer’s cramp.

The only way to learn to spell those words that now plague you is to devise a mnemonic for each one.

If you are never quite sure whether it’s indispensible or indispensable, you can spell it out one hundred, one thousand, or one million times—and the next time you have occasion to write it in a sentence, you’ll still wonder whether to end it with -ible or -able. But if you say to yourself just once that able people are generally indispensable, that thought will come to you whenever you need to spell the word; in a few seconds you’ve conquered another spelling demon. By engineering your own mnemonic through a study of the architecture of a troublesome word, you will become so quickly and completely involved with the correct spelling of that word that it will be impossible for you ever to be stumped again.

Let us start at once. Below you will find another twenty-five words from the list of one hundred demons, each offered to you in both the correct form and in the popular misspelling. Go through the test quickly, checking off what you consider a proper choice in each case. In that way you will discover which of the twenty-five you would be likely to get caught on. Then devise a personal mnemonic for each word you flunked, writing your ingenious result out in the margin of the page. And don’t be alarmed if some of your mnemonics turn out kind of silly—the sillier they are the more likely you are to recall them in an emergency. One of my pupils, who could not remember how many l’s to put into tranquillity (or is it tranquility?), shifted his mind into high gear and came up with this: “In the old days life was more tranquil than today, and people wrote with quills instead of fountain pens. Hence—tranquillity!” Another pupil, a girl who always chewed her nails over irresistible before she could decide whether to end it with -ible or -able, suddenly realized that a certain brand of lipstick was called irresistible, the point being of course that the only vowel in lipstick is i—hence, -ible! Silly, aren’t they? But they work. Go ahead to the test now; and see how clever—or silly—you can be.

By now you’re well on the way toward developing a definite superiority complex about your spelling—which isn’t a half-bad thing, for I’ve learned, working with my students, that many people think they’re awful spellers, and have completely lost faith in their ability, solely because they get befuddled over no more than two dozen or so common words that they use over and over again and always misspell. Every other word they spell perfectly, but they still think they’re prize boobs in spelling until their self-confidence is restored. So if you’re beginning to gain more assurance, you’re on the right track. The conquest of the one hundred common words most frequently misspelled is not going to assure you that you will always come out top man in a spelling bee, but it’s certain to clean up your writing and bolster your ego.

So far you have worked with fifty of the one hundred spelling demons. Here, now, is the remainder of the list. Test yourself, or have someone who can keep a secret test you, and discover which ones are your Waterloo. Study each one you miss as if it were a problem in engineering. Observe how it’s put together and devise whatever association pattern will fix the correct form in your mind.

Happy spelling!