Tongue-Tied

Oh, give me a break:

When "say," "they" and "weigh" rhyme, but "bomb," "comb" and "tomb" don't, wuudn't it maek mor sens to spel wurdz the wae thae sound?

Those in favor of simplified spelling say children would learn faster and illiteracy rates would drop. Opponents say a new system would make spelling even more confusing.

Eether wae, the consept has yet to capcher th publix imajinaeshun.

It's been 100 years since Andrew Carnegie helped create the Simplified Spelling Board to promote a retooling of written English and President Theodore Roosevelt tried to force the government to use simplified spelling in its publications. But advocates aren't giving up.

They even picket the national spelling bee finals, held every year in Washington, costumed as bumble bees and hoisting signs that say "Enuf is enuf but enough is too much" or "I'm thru with through."

So, basically, people are too stupid and/or lazy to bother to learn their own language? Funny, I bet these are the same people who bitch about foreigners not learning English. You know, math is hard, too. All that remembering stuff. Let's just make everything equal 5. Wouldn't that be so much easier? Heck, let's not even bother with education; let's just lower all the goalposts and be done with it. That way, everyone can go back to watching American Idol or playing video games and not have to worry about, you know, learning things.

Seriously, though, let's think about this. Say we completely revise English and start teaching kids how to spell using these new rules. There's still a whole heck of a lot of "legacy" spelling left in the world--like every book that has ever been published in English. How will kids brought up with new rules of spelling read them? (Try reading The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English and you'll get a sense of what the situation is going to be.) How will they communicate with older people (like me)? And if we're simply creating rules of spelling based on how words sound, how do we deal with regional accents? Do we spell everything the way New Englanders talk? The way Brooklynites tawk? Or what?

Actually, it occurs to me that with all this instant and text messaging shorthand (most of which I can't understand), we're halfway there already. k?

The English language is as complicated to learn because it's a language that has evolved organically. That is, unlike French, there is no controlling authority that regulates what words can be added, how they should be constructed, etc. English evolved strictly through how people spoke and wrote it over the centuries. (For a highly entertaining history of the English language, and the American version of it, I recommend Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue and Made in America.) In some ways, it actually has become simpler. And do we really want to emulate the French?

When people bemoan illiteracy rates, the first response should not be, "Oh, let's make it easier to learn English." That's kind of going about it the wrong way; reducing illiteracy is important because the key to functioning in today's society is being able to communicate with others. If we change the rules of English solely to reduce this number, then we're ultimately going to make it harder for people to communicate with people who have been brought up with the old way. It's bad enough, in this age of e-mail and IM, that people type so poorly or quickly that I have no idea what half the things people write to me mean, I really don't want them to suddenly start writing to me in a different version of English!