In the superb musical "My Fair Lady," based on Shaw's "Pygmalion," Professor Henry Higgins dazzles our ears and eyes as he stunningly transforms Eliza Doolittle's coarse, slovenly speech, appearance, and manners. It was Shaw's dream to transform our coarse, slovenly spelling in the same miraculous manner.

Let's stun the world by transforming our spelling in a dazzling way that would amaze even 'enry 'iggins.

A Provocative Analogy

(From the NuSpel Newsletter)

It has been reported in print and electronic media that in a certain western city permission to clean up and pave an almost impassable alley full of weeds and strewn with garbage was denied on grounds that this would destroy a part of our historical heritage which should be preserved unaltered as a "living museum".

Our spelling has been a dead-end back alley like this for centuries. The time has come to get it out of our everyday lives, consigning it to museums, libraries and private collections with other collectibles and curios in the form of handwritten and printed texts on paper, T-shirts, signs, diskettes, compact disks—whatever.

A recently published attack on English spelling reform asserts that cleaning up our spelling will not happen, inasmuch as such an uncalled-for act would destroy precious relics which enable us to recognize the origins of our words. This is garbage straight from the back alley, but let's charitably categorize it as nothing more than a classic dumb remark made with insufficient forethought and afterthought.

In what way, exactly does the relic "gh," for example, reveal its origin(s) to us? Will gazing intently enough and long enough at hiccough, cough, though, thought, through, plough, tough, ghost, ghee, ghetto, ghastly and ghoul somehow give us a clue? Will pronouncing each "gh" aloud do the trick? Would the spellings (saving 29 keystrokes or 41%) reveal origins one teensy bit worse or better, if one is not an eminent specialist at this?

Every single English word, of course, has a history. Our words can be traced back—in their initial form—through 80 languages, at least, and, if part of our language for very long, they've undergone changes. The Oxford Unabridged Dictionary lists over 600,000 words. Imagine the years of research and analysis required to compile such a tremendous number of word histories. How much of all this is obvious from our spelling to the average reader or even to an etymologist whose life's work has been the study of the origin and development of our affixes, words and phrases? We're talking about an enormous data bank of lexical, phonetic, morphological, syntactical, socio-cultural and historical information.

So whatever the spelling, the only way we can hope to "recognize" the origin of an English word is through a knowledge of many languages—not just in their modern but also in their archaic forms—plus a gift for analysis and lots of experience. Otherwise, our only recourse is to devote ourselves to a thorough study of histories of the language and etymological treatises. For basic derivations and parallels, however, all we have to do is open a good English dictionary.

cough (kôf) [ME. coughen, akin to MDu. cuchen, to cough, G. keuchen, to gasp] (ME = Middle English, MDu = Middle Dutch, and G = German.)

New space-age dictionaries will impart exactly the same information but will list first, then ME. coughen, etc. and finally PR. (pre-reform) cough. Histories of the English language and English spelling will add new chapters.

So, returning to the analogy of the alley, guaranteed to provoke all "purists," let the self-appointed and and anointed guardians of the mistimed and misplaced have their politically correct, pure, unadulteratedly cruddy alley, but NIMBY! (Not in my back yard!)

Keeping my nose and distance from such "live history," I would hang instead photos of yellow, faded samples of OldSpel next to a similar photographic "history" of our old outhouse on the farm (with pages torn from an old Sears catalog and torn-up newspapers on the floor—in lieu of toilet paper—and a stylish crescent moon cut in the door) together with explanatory notes describing how things of this sort were at some places and times in the past. Lovers of such history should recreate it in museums and charge admission to those too devoid of imagination, understanding, emphathy, and gray matter to conceive what an outhouse or other things in distant times or places might be like.

Hanging in my office are some very interesting and instructive samples of ancient writing. They're history now, along with their users, and priceless as such. Valuable insights and lessons may be drawn from studying them and depictions of their ancient development and use in the form of TV documentaries could be of great interest and value. But we're not about to start using ancient Egyptian hierogyphics again, or anything like them.

Eventually—inevitably and inexorably—English OldSpel will be history. No way can the zealous guardians of its "purity" preserve it forever. It has accumulated too many baneful odds and ends and excrescences to survive much longer. All decent people abhor crud, so let's get to work and wash, scrape, scrub and blast it out of our spelling. Let our generation have the honor, distinction and glory to finally, at long last, make history by making OldSpel "history".

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