A column on writing from Editor & Publisher June 6, 1981.
Spelling
"If your Polish and your proud!"
That title is on the cover of a best-selling record album that reads,
JIMMY STURR & HIS ORCHESTRA ...
IF YOUR POLISH AND YOUR PROUD!
If you're like the first 10 that I showed the album to, writers all, you're catching the errors only about now.
The three most frequently misspelled words in English are your (for you're), its (for it's, or vice versa), and there or their (for they're). They have always been the Worst Words in rough drafts, memos, and schoolwork, but plague-like, they have been breaking out in public places -- album covers, calendars, menus, posters, newspaper columns.
Reporters are producing sloppy copy, and editors are letting it by. It should be possible to contain this epidemic, but first a word about the root of the malady, English spelling.
Spelling problems are an English joke, not a Polish one. Polish, like many others is a fat-cat-sat-on-a-flat-mat language, with completely predictable, phonic spelling. That is, when you learn the rule for each letter, like a, you can always predict its pronunciation and spelling.
If it's a as in cat, then a is always pronounced as in cat, so that when you hear blat, you know how to spell it. In about six weeks, without understanding a word, you can learn to read Greek or pray in Hebrew out loud, one of them backwards, both with strange alphabets.
In contrast, English is a what-a-crazy-squatting-cat language, every vowel having several pronunciations. When you hear what or squat, you haven't a clue in the word about spelling it or saying it. Should it be what to rhyme with cut, or with watt, or with cat? No rule.
Consonants are not to be trusted, either, often remaining silent because of an irrelevant etymology- February. Homonyms (you're, your) are everyone's bane. Names sink us all: "Regan In" (the Treasury Secretary). "Reagan In" (the President).
With the rash of typos on flyers, menus, and in newspapers, alarmists conclude that the ability of Americans to spell has collapsed. Unlikely-- it's always been shaky. How could it be otherwise? But in earlier days, a well-trained and gifted corps of proofreaders made public and printed language nearly flawless.
Thirty years ago, back in the '50's, well-nigh every secretary I knew saved her boss daily from public shame whenever she typed his misspelled memos. Today, many of the articulate young women who once would have become sharp stenos go on to graduate schools in business or law. Our current secretaries come from the TV generation, still sharp but often less proficient in the written language. Their bosses are not worse than earlier ones, only more exposed.
Reporters and editors were backed up by linotypists, who -- their hilarious errors notwithstanding-- knew how to spell. Printers of items like album covers, near-perfect spellers, too, also set type letter by letter, which must help catch errors. Today, hardly any type is handset.
Moreover, reading the terminal's video screen makes spotting mistakes harder. But the copy desk, very often the writer's only backup now, is also green-lit and screened. We're each our own editor now, an alter ego doomed to overlook problems.
I wouldn't give up my word processor to prevent all the typos in Topeka, but when yew cant spell, you're editors assume your ignerant, and hour readers wont pay us much mined ether.
See also #12 Shakspeare, Shakespere, Shakespeare.
Ethel Grodzins Romm is a writer and editor currently living in New York City. She is the author of The Open Conspiracy: What America's Angry Generation is Saying (review) (auction with cover), several of the Strategies in Reading workbook series and others. She appeared in the film Paranormal: Science or Pseudoscience? She has written columns on language for Editor & Publisher, The American Bar Association Journal and many others. She is currently working on a book on management.
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