Preliminary draft of an essay about one of the three news stories I mentioned three days ago that I’d read and wanted to write about:

Here’s the headline my local paper gave the story I’m writing about here: “Experts: English spelling needs overhaul.”   The newspaper story begins with: “Today Sam will plough through the city’s rough boroughs in search of artisanal cookie dough, even though he ought to stay home to nurse his bad cough.”   The reader is then asked what is wrong with that picture.  Answer: “Eight words containing ‘ough.’”  They are “wrong” because not all pronounced the same.  They are orthographically unregimated!

“Experts” having been trying to correct the spelling of English words for decades.  Some seventy years ago, one of my favorite writers, George Bernard Shaw, was been given credit for the spelling of “fish,” as “ghoti,” from rouGH, wOmen, and moTIon (or any of many words containing “tion.”  Almost a century before that, someone had invented the word in a letter, but no one made it available to the world-at-large until Shaw, or someone of his time, did.  Shaw seems a fair choice because of his fanatical devotion to “improving” the language by regulating spelling.

Note: Shaw was a brilliant prose writer, but not a poet.  I bring that up because it seems to me centrally important.  What is going on here boils down to a confrontation between efficiency experts and poets, with a lot of more or less indifferent bystanders.  I’m on the poets’ side not just because I’m a poet myself, but because of the kind of poet I sometimes am.  Here, in their entirety, are two examples of my work as what I call an “infra-verbal poet” (for a poet who works below the level of words): “lighf” and “whomb.”

These are from Ampersand Squared, an anthology of one-word poems edited by Geof Huth that includes many other similarly misspelled poems, such as bpNichol’s “groww.”  Each of these, by the way, is the sole occupant of the page it is on, which is important for bothering a reader into paying full attention to them.

Two more worth mention are from Huth’s collection of his own one-word poems, wreadings (besides his collection’s title): “myrrhmyrrh” and “sweeat.”   In an ideal whirled these examples would be enough to convince just about everyone of the high value of the varied ways the English language is spelled—and of the need to defend it from those calling for its orthographic sterilization.  Some will fail to be convinced, however, so I guess I’ll need to provide a few details to bolster my claim.

First of all, let me say that the English language’s variety of spelling is valuable for many reasons other than the way it can enlarge the possibilities of poetry in English.  Pointing out its value for poets, though, should help indicate its over-all value.  So, I have five samples of poems that could not exist if English spelling were regularized the way spelling puritans would like it to be.  We would then have “life” and “lite” (I assume) for “life” and “light,” and “gh” would probably never be used in a word.  My “lighf” as a sort of pun suggesting the conversion of light to life would be impossible.  Nor would a single word suggesting the mystery of an unknown person developing inside a womb be possible if “whom” were spelled “hoo” or however the experts thought it should be.

Similarly “groww” would be killed if “grow” were spelled “grow,” and the proper spelling of “myrrh” as “mur,” or whatever, and of “eat” as “eet” would make the suggestion of the spreading fragrance of myrrh as a murmur, and  of sweetness as something to be really savored the way Huth’s poems have impossible.  In short, for those sensitive to such things, the bad spelling of English improves it as a language.

More important, while the fact that spellings are not so predictable in English as they are in other languages, may well make English harder for children to learn “basic literacy skills,” as the experts the newspaper story is about, a group called “The English Spelling Society” headed by Stephen (not “Steven!”) Linstead, argue (with support from some academic study), I strongly suspect that the literacy skills English-speaking children eventually gain are superior to those of children speaking other languages.  An indication of that is the high reputation of poetry in English.

I have a fairly complex amount of completely uncertified ideas about why children might gain from having to learn English.  One is simply that it’s more fun than others!  I still smile whenever I think back to first grade when I learned that “see” and “sea” were pronounced the same.  Another is that English is more like reality than other languages are, so one learning it simultaneously learns how to avoid difficulty in general.  And a kid who has to learn it will be better prepared for later learning challenges, both by realizing they be there, and by feeling confident about his ability to meet them, if he’s succeeded reasonably well with English.

If not, well, there will always be those with learning problems with everything.  But it’s clear that just about everyone learns English well enough to get by eventually.

I haven’t yet mention what I consider the most important value of English’s bad spelling: the way it tends to trip one off-course because of the many homonyms (different words that sound the same) it results in.  Each of these connects a listener to more than one meaning: someone hearing the word, “reign,” may more vividly experience a bad king’s time on a throne as rainy, for instance.  This may seem very trivial, but I claim that the more connections a brain can make, even if many are arbitrary, the more creative it will be.  Needless to say, my dependence on such connections as a poet is a big reason for that.

It will also result in a greater likelihood of errors—losing a track of thought, for example, as opposed to lucking into an unexpected but relevant helpful thought.  Perfect “good spelling” and you’ll tend to produce robots always going from “rane” to the same place in his brane—and making a lot of mistakes, anyway, out of boredom with the language’s predictability.

Finally, I view the controversy as, finally, between those favoring a country run by experts over a free country.  But that’s politics, so I won’t say nothin’ more.
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Read my previous entry before reading this–I failed to click the button that would have posted it yesterday until today.

It took me several minutes to figure out what the list below was of, and I wrote it. My first thought that it was an attempt at a poem. Then I thought I might refer to different poems, perhaps as notes about what I wanted to say about them. Finally the letters down the lefthand side reminded me of my still-continuing attempt to find a specimen of every letter in some word in English in which the letter is silent, the way a is silent in “aesthete.”

I think, after studying the list, that I need a word containing a silent h.  “Whet” does not–its h changes the sound of its w.  (I don’t count double letters like gh.)  Most of the letters on the left are ones I haven’t yet found silent anywhere.  The x I have: in “faux.”

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