Wunse apon a tyym, English wurdz wur speld the wey thay sownded.

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Wunse apon a tyym, English wurdz wur speld the wey thay sownded. 

Thehr wuz no suhch thyng az a mysspeld wurd.  Over tyme, tho, as the

langwage evolved, how wurds were spelt became standardized, largely

due to the invention of the printing press, and later, dictionaries.  Ever

since the late 1700s, there have been consistent calls in the English-

speaking world for a simplified system of spelling, but these attempts at

reform have been misdiagnosing the problem:  the entire notion of

“spelling words correctly” is an outdated, unhelpful element of English,

and one that we should rid ourselves of entirely.

Writing is supposed to transcribe the spoken sounds of a particular

language, and this function once was true of English—it explains why so

many of our words cannot be “sounded out,” as we are often advised to

do by well-meaning but unhelpful teachers.  Contemporary English

spelling is largely and most unhelpfully frozen in the spoken language of

over 400 years ago—in the spoken language of London, England in the

1600s, to be precise.  This fact explains why words

like knight and folk and enough are spelled the way they are:  those are

the sounds—every kuh and ell and guh—people in London made when

they said these words in the seventeenth century.  The pronunciations

got frozen in the spelling because this was also the time that printed

books began to be sold in (relatively) large numbers, leading to the new

idea that the way the words appeared in print was the way they

were supposed to be spelled.  And to make matters worse, those who

were seeking to increase this trend of standardized English throughout

the 1600s and 1700s—mainly classically-educated writers and

academics—often changed the spelling of perfectly straightforward

words like rime and det to reflect the Latin roots of these words, in an

attempt to refine the supposedly unsophisticated words

into rhyme and debt.

All of which leads us to the mess that English is in today, at least in terms

of spelling.  Those teachers who tell us to sound out words we cannot

spell are really doing us no favours past about the second grade:  far too

many words are spelled nothing like they sound, so we must learn the

“rule” for spelling certain similar-sounding words, and then the

exceptions to the rule (which would seem to suggest that it was never

really a rule in the first place).  Remember learning the mnemonic rule-

and-exception-to-the-rule “i before e, except after c, or when sounding

like a as in neighbor and weigh”?  It’s helpful for remembering how to spell

words like friend and receive, but what about other common words

like ancient or beige or science?  And really, if a child writes something like

“palleontolagy is the study of anceint life on earth,” he or she is not

wrong in terms of ideas, only in spelling.  And which, in this “u-txt-me ill-

txt-u” world, is most important? 

We don’t need to merely simplify English spelling; we need to return it to

what it was in the days of Shakespeare, who in fact, never spelled his

name that way himself:  in his will, he spelled it Shakspere in one place

and Shakspeare in another.  We need to return to a time when what the

words meant was more important than how they appeared on the page,

when the expression of ideas was unhindered by attempts to remember

the antiquated, irrelevant letter-order of the words themselves, when

we could write in our own, true voices.  Imagine a world—or rather, your

potential in a world—where if you didn’t know how to spell a word, you

really could just sound it out.