Page 565 - Word Power Made Easy: The Complete Handbook for Building a Superior Vocabulary

Brief Intermission Eight

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 ve-year grant of funds from Carnegie, and headed by the esteemed
scholar Brander Matthews, the Simpli ed 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 a ected 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:

SPELLING THEN CURRENT SIMPLIFIED SPELLING

mediaeval medieval

doubt dout

debtor dettor

head hed

though tho

through thru

laugh laf

tough tuf

knife nife

theatre theater

centre center

phantom fantom

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