| 词组 | spelling |
| 释义 | spelling Ernest Hemingway, in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, made this remark in his first paragraph: • You write a swell letter. Glad somebody spells worse than I do —24 Dec. 1925 Fitzgerald was notorious for his bad spelling, although one of his editors says in his defense that his spelling seemed worse than it really was because he consistently misspelled certain words. Hemingway, on the other hand, was an inconsistent misspeller; he could spell a word both right and wrong in the same letter. It does not seem the least bit strange to talk about someone's misspelling words. We do it all the time, and quite a few usage commentators have been fond of belittling their correspondents (the ones who disagree with them) and others on the basis of bad spelling. But bad spelling is a flimsy basis for belittling anyone; you can see that the literary reputations of Fitzgerald and Hemingway have not suffered noticeably by their personal difficulties with English orthography. Nor is it easy to think of any writer who made a considerable reputation on the basis of slick spelling alone. Wilson 1987 makes the interesting observation that "spelling is mostly a neuromuscular skill in the development of which practice helps, but for which certain innate equipment is the main requirement." In this respect it is rather like swinging a golf club, hitting a tennis ball, or playing the guitar. You know you can improve by practice, but somehow you suspect that Nancy Lopez will putt better, Ivan Lendl will serve better, and Andres Segovia will play better than you, no matter how much practicing you do. Aptitude for spelling is no more evenly distributed in the population than is aptitude for golf, tennis, or guitar. We all have to make the best of the ability we have. Those whose innate ability to spell is not especially high can take heart by remembering that there are various devices— dictionaries, spelling books, and latterly computer chips, for instance—that can be far more useful to a bad speller than a new putter is to a bad golfer. The idea of bad spelling is a relatively new one. If Ben Jonson had corresponded familiarly with William Shakespeare, he would not have made the sort of wisecrack that Hemingway made to Fitzgerald. In Shakespeare's time there were no rules for spelling English, a situation which troubled some reformers. Thomas Smith, John Hart, and William Bullokar, from about the mid-1560s to the 1580s, separately published works advocating phonetic spelling systems. The advocacy of such systems probably represented some reaction to the Latin-based tinkering with English spelling that was going on at about the same time, in which a number of words were remodeled according to their real or supposed ultimate classical source. Many of these tinker-ings have come down to us. For instance, avance became advance; faucon, falcon; parfit, perfect; dette, debt; doutte, doubt; vittles, victuals; and savacion, salvation (these particular examples are drawn from McKnight 1928 and Strang 1970). Some of these tinker-ings were downright erroneous: the 5 in island, for one, has no business being there; the word is not related to isle (from early French) but comes from Old English igland or iegland. The c in scissors and scythe is a similar intruder. But we live with them all today. The conventional spelling of today was arrived at only gradually. The two primary influences in its development were printers and dictionaries. Printers began the trend toward consistency, if not regularization, in the 17th century—earlier printers had been anything but an influence in that direction because they often varied the spelling of words to justify (that is, to space evenly) their lines. The invention of more varied spacing material later made that dodge unnecessary. There followed a trend toward normalization, to some extent based on the spellings used in the King James Bible. When large dictionaries became available in the 18th century, printers had another authority to follow, and the trend toward uniformity increased. Greater uniformity of spelling meant that the number of acceptable variant spellings was greatly reduced. But more survive in dictionaries than many people realize. Their recognition is not as consistent as you might expect, but lexicographers have no simple objective test by which to judge the acceptability of a variant spelling. Almost any reasonable spelling will be found to have some historical precedent, given the history of our present-day spelling; what is given dictionary recognition, therefore, is often a matter of precedent in earlier editions and individual decisions made by editors. Extraneous factors—such as the number of pages available for a given edition—may also complicate editorial decisions. So some inconsistency is to be expected. Let us look at a few specific cases. How about vocal chords? Do you consider that a misspelling? The original spelling of the second part was cord. But cord has Latin and Greek forebears, and sometime in the past one of those etymological tinkerers stuck an h into it to show the connection with Latin and Greek. The spelling chord thus became the scholarly spelling. It was used in mathematics and music—and still is. It was also used in medicine for anatomical structures: hence spinal chord, vocal chord. In American English the old cord is now used anatomically, but there is still some lingering use of chord in British technical publications, and quite a lot in popular American writing. Is it incorrect? When confident came into English from French, it had but one spelling as both a noun and an adjective. In the 18th century the variant spellings confidant and confidante for the noun were invented. They proved to be useful, for they distinguished the parts of speech. Today the handbooks tell us that the original and etymologi-cally correct confident is an error for the noun. Momento is an unetymological spelling of memento, probably influenced by English moment. The first dictionary to recognize it as a variant was Webster's Third in 1961. Its inclusion there was an individual editorial decision, but subsequent events seem to have justified the decision: the OED Supplement has now recognized the spelling, citing George Eliot and Dylan Thomas in support. Our archives have recently yielded an early example in an 1853 letter written by Chauncey A. Goodrich, the first editor in chief of Merriam-Webster dictionaries. Of course recognition of a variant spelling like momento by any number of dictionaries does not force you to use it. But stop and think a moment. If you reject momento as a misspelling, on what grounds do you base your objection? Certainly it is unetymological,. but so is confidante, so is island, so is scissors. A better basis for deciding whether to use or reject a variant spelling is prevalent current use; most people spell it memento. Our present-day spelling, then, is a mishmash of archaism, reform, error, and accident, and it is unsurprising that not everyone who is heir to the tradition can handle it perfectly. Even so, with all the aids available to the poor speller, including electronic spelling-checkers, you might think there would be very few misspellings found in print. But the opposite is true, to judge from ordinary observation and from published comment. There seem to be several factors bearing on this. First, there seems to be a noticeably smaller population of proofreaders and copy editors in the publishing business than there once was. Taking the place of proofreaders in some cases is the electronic device for checking spelling. Most such devices are very good at finding mechanical errors: if you intend "sly as a fox" but instead keyboard in "sgy as a ofx," the machine will catch the errors. But if you enter "shy as a fox" or "sly as a box," the chances are the machine will not find anything wrong, for both shy and box are real words. It has been conjectured, perhaps without basis, that overreliance on such machines may account for the frequency with which garbled homophones—they're for their, reign for rein, tow for toe, diffuse for defuse, sight for site, and so forth—can be found in print, not infrequently in rather tony publications. An additional consideration has been suggested by Robert Burchfield, editor of the OED Supplement. In an interview published in the Boston Sunday Globe (12 May 1985), he observed that in our age of electronic communication numbers are more important than words. On a flight plan or airline reservation, if the dates and numbers are correct, a misspelled word or two does not matter. Burchfield suggests that we may be going back to a time, like that of Shakespeare, when spelling was not a matter of prime importance. If he is right, you will be finding even more funny spellings in your newspapers, magazines, and books. We hope you do not find too many in this book (although "shy as a fox" almost got in). Many of the words that commentators feel to be frequently misspelled are separate entries in this book. See also spelling reform. |
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