Spelling Bee Protester replies

Spelling-bee protesters 'thru with through', the Seattle Times ^ | June 3, 2004 | Seattle Times

[Spellfix]

I am in the printer toner business. Your attempts to make fewer letters in words will dry up our business. Expect an assassination to follow shortly.
We cannot risk the possibility you will succeed.

> I take this very seriously because you are right! It will save about 10% of the ink we now waste, and the paper too, and trees, a forest the size of Manhattan Island every year. (Uh oh, here come the lumberjacks!) One of the reasons we got pointless e's on the end of a lot of words was that the Flemish printers we used didn't speak much English but did get paid the total type they set. So they just added e's wherever they could get away with it.

But you're assassins will never take me alive!

Alan

[Spellfix]

>The English language is the result of the merging of at least 3 languages (Saxon, Danish, Norman French) and significant inclusion from Latin and Greek. Your proposal eliminates the history of our language from the language.

Is there one person in a million who gushes over finding a word stem that is Danish instead of Saxon? Or who cares? Scholars already look up most words in the dictionary to find their origins; looking up a few more won't hurt them. But every day there are forty million Americans who can't read and suffer greatly for that, and making our spelling honest will really help them.

Tradition is a similar reason not to change. England used that one as a reason to keep primogenitor and a host of other bad laws. Americans won the Revolution and exulted at being able to junk them, to start over and do things right. Tom Paine wrote "We have it in our power to begin the world anew..."

The British had a monetary system reflecting a lot of history too.(Aye, what a night it was when the King made this up! Never was a man so drunk, Never!) It was a little unhandy for calculations tho. 4 farthings was a penny, 12 pence was a shilling, 20 shillings was a pound, and 21 shillings was a guinea. (Now tell me quick, I give you a five pound note for a bill of 2 guineas, 19 shillings, 11 pence 3 farthings. What's the right change? Can you calculate it in five minutes? Can you do it in your head, or will you need pencil and paper?)

America adopted the decimal Dollar. (Change from a five for $2.97? Easy!) England stuck to their silly system and probably gave the same reasons you all do for keeping spelling unchanged -- Sacred Tradition, King Ug did it, *I* had to suffer so make the kids do it too, Change is impossible, Ha Ha, your system should be called Lazy-Pig-money!

They finally gave it up in 1971. Children got decimal pounds right away, but lots of old people had real trouble with 100 pence to the pound. Or said they did.

Bad systems *can* be changed. Changing them is very American. Just because the Picts never bathed is no reason we shouldn't. And if you don't want to smell like a Druid, why would you want to spell like one?

[Spellfix]

Spellfix Thanks Blog

Dear Blog:

Spellfix thanks you for debating with me. Some of you may wonder that I found it a good experience, but I did. I posted a position and around a hundred of you commented. It was a good statistical exercise, because now reformers know which arguments appear most frequently and what it takes to overcome them. And what we have to work on. (For example, someone remarked that the Japanese have high literacy in spite of their strange amalgam of three alphabets and a lot of iconic characters, all of which are sometimes used in one sentence! Although I think all three alphabets are honest phonetic ones, that needs more research. Also, East Asians have high IQ's (around 107 average) and may learn *in spite* of the difficulty.)

One other, non-confrontational comment. Should you ever want to discover what the public thinks of *any* idea or argument, posting and debating it on a blog is an excellent way to do so. You *could* hire a survey firm and they could take months to set up a survey and offer money to hundreds of people to get maybe one hundred to participate. Or, quickly and free, you could post to a blog. In a week or two you have your results and can re-form your arguments to be more effective, and then perhaps post to another blog. Can you think of any way you could have done this before the Internet? Great institutions, the Net and the blog.

Thanks again for your comments,

Regards,

Alan Mole (Spellfix), President American Literacy Council