The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

by Bill Bryson

Language, never forget, is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling, and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.

More than eighty spellings of Shakespeare’s name have been found, among them Shagspeare, Shakspere, and even Shakestaffe. Shakespeare himself did not spell the name the same way twice in any of his six known signatures and even spelled it two ways on one document, his will, which he signed Shakspere in one place and Shakspeare in another. Curiously, the one spelling he never seemed to use himself was Shakespeare. Much is often made of all this, but a moment’s reflection should persuade us that a person’s signature, whether he be an Elizabethan playwright or a modern orthodontist, is about the least reliable way of determining how he spells his name.

Before 1400, it was possible to tell with some precision where in Britain a letter or manuscript was written just from the spellings.

When in the seventeenth century the English developed a passion for the classical languages, certain well-meaning meddlers began fiddling with the spellings of many other words in an effort to make them conform to a Latin ideal. Thus b’s were inserted into debt and doubt, which had previously been spelled dette and doute, out of deference to the Latin originals, debitum and dubitare. Receipt picked up a p by the same method. Island gained its s, scissors its c, anchor its h. Tight and delight became consistent with night and right, though without any etymological basis. Rime became rhyme. In several instances our spelling became more irregular rather than less.

turning America into the only country in history where deviant spelling would be a punishable offense.

To the untrained eye Pitman’s phonographic alphabet looks rather like a cross between Arabic and the trail of a sidewinder snake, and of course it never caught on.

It is hard to say which is the more remarkable, the number of influential people who became interested in spelling reform or the little effect they had on it.

the Simplified Spelling Board began a long slide into obscurity and eventual death.

In 1712, Jonathan Swift joined the chorus with a Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue. Some indication of the strength of feeling attached to these matters is given by the fact that in 1780, in the midst of the American Revolution, John Adams wrote to the president of Congress appealing to him to set up an academy for the purpose of “refining, correcting, improving and ascertaining the English language” (a

These figures write books, give lectures, and otherwise do what they can (i.e., next to nothing) to try to stanch (not staunch) the perceived decline of the language. They point out that there is a useful distinction to be observed between uninterested and disinterested, between imply and infer, flaunt and flout, fortunate and fortuitous, forgo and forego, and discomfort and discomfit (not forgetting stanch and staunch). They point out that fulsome, properly used, is a term of abuse, not praise, that peruse actually means to read thoroughly, not glance through, that data and media are plurals. And from the highest offices in the land they are ignored.

and produced a sanitized version of the Bible, in which Onan doesn’t spill his seed but simply “frustrates his purpose,” in which men don’t have testicles but rather “peculiar members,” and in which women don’t have

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