Creative Miss Pelling

By Peter Lloyd

Andrew Jackson and Mark Twain have both been credited with saying something along the lines of, “I have no respect for a man who can spell a word only one way.” I have to agree. But that’s not the problem. Most of us can spell a word any number of ways. The challenge is to do so creatively.

The problem—those uncreative pedants who demand that there is only one correct way to spell a word. Ridiculous! There never has been. The solution—the chaos of the English-speaking world. Nobody’s in charge of our language. Yes! There is no English Academy of Language. Hooray! The influx of words from all over the world into a language that began as a mishmash has made English a spelling free-for-all!

Try this on your friends. Make it a bar bet. Spell a series of English words and challenge someone to pronounce them all quickly and correctly. The point is to trick them into mispronouncing the final word in your list. For example: c-o-w, h-o-w, n-o-w, t-o-w. Your listener will pronounce the first three correctly, then stumble on the fourth. Do the same with m-o-l-d-e-r, c-o-l-d-e-r, f-o-l-d-e-r, and s-o-l-d-e-r.

With at least eight ways to pronounce ough—through, though, rough, hiccough, cough, thought, plough, and slough—how can anyone even begin to claim we have standards, much less order? English spelling is such a junkyard, that one spelling reformer of the 19th century suggested that ghoti could be pronounced “fish.” The gh as is “tough,” o as in “women,” and ti as in “pronunciation.”

Wut two dew
Noble attempts at English spelling reform have always failed. Either from organized resistance or lack of interest. And they always will, because English speakers simply won’t stand for it. There are just too many of us already fiercely clinging to our own spelling and pronunciation preferences. To insist on the superiority or correctness of one over the other simply betrays a prejudice.

You say tuh-MAY-toe and I say tun-MAH-toe. Let’s appreciate that. My pronunciation, if your ear is keen enough, tells you where I’m from or with whom I identify, my level of education or my willingness to play with words. If we let everyone spell as creatively as we allow them to pronounce, we could bring a similar layer of communication to our writing. Twain spells out how this works in his autobiography.

Before the spelling-book came with its arbitrary forms, men unconsciously revealed shades of their characters and also added enlightening shades of expression to what they wrote by their spelling, and so it is possible that the spelling-book has been a doubtful benevolence to us.

Spelling as a form of creative expression. Why not? We’ve always done it with brand names: WordPress, Beatles, Krispy Kreme, Gorillaz, iPhone, Eminem, Citibank, OutKast... You don’t have to be a hip-hop star to spell creatively. But if you want to make your brand more approachable, creative spelling can help: C’est Cheese, Cycology Bicycles, Napoleon Boiler Parts. You already hint something about where you’re from when you choose between writing neighbor and neighbour. Or how current you are when you choose cigaret over cigarette, dialog over dialogue. See where you can go with this?

If you’re not ready for thru rather than through, fine. Neither am I. But let’s not discredit or discount writers who are. Creative Miss Pelling will continue to improve the color and texture of English, if we let her. But we all have to help.

There’s plenty of creative spelling work to do. We need a dual-gender pronoun to replace the abomination s/he and the contraption he/she. So get out there and misspell! But do it judiciously. Help people get used to creative spelling in your phone texts. Use words currently going thru transition and spell them the more economical way whenever you can get away with it. That is, whenever a Miss Pelling will not make you look like you don’t know any better.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.

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