A vicious beehive

One more Spelling Bee is behind us, and one more benighted youngster took the cake. In the final round, he spelled the word éclaircissement “making an obscure subject clear” correctly. He is thirteen years old, he has been playing this game for seven years, and he was the runner up in 2024. According to his statement, he spent five to six hours daily on weekdays and seven to eight hours on weekends studying the dictionary for unfamiliar words. Moreover, he has been practicing this thing for the last seven years, that is, almost since his kindergarten days. I am of course sorry for the kid, because I am not a fan of child abuse and because I know that one can be young only once. Rather long ago, I already spewed my contempt and ire at Spelling Bee, and I remember that my pamphlet did not produce the slightest stir. But as Cyrano de Bergerac said on a different occasion: “One does not always fight to win.” That is why I’ll once again return to Spelling Bee, Spelling Reform, and Walter William Skeat.

Learning the spelling of the words one will never use or even encounter looks like an unprofitable occupation. I suspect that the hero of this year’s contest does not read or speak French (there was no time to learn it). What then is the use of knowing the word éclaircissement? He also spelled Chaldee, Symlin, olona, and adytum correctly. The website says that after winning the prize, he collapsed with excitement and fatigue. And the admiring people who would not hurt a tadpole watched and applauded.

English spelling is irrational and tough, but why should our youngsters know how to spell olona? Wouldn’t it have been more profitable to read Shakespeare, Dickens, and Mark Twain (not of course for five or six hours a day) and come across all kinds of unfamiliar language in them: obsolete but interesting nouns and verbs used in the days of Queen Elizabeth I, the British slang of Artful Dodger, and some medieval vocabulary occurring in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court? What a feast of words! Our winner could have learned French and even Latin, or (since he knew how to spell Chaldee) even Hebrew.

English speakers are poor spellers (and for good reason), and considering the fact that most schools in the United States do not teach grammar, this fact should not surprise anyone. My undergraduate students need a semester to learn the difference between the present and the past participle and the mysteries of subordinate clauses. But spelling stopped bothering them long ago, because today, the spell checker does all the work for them. It dutifully changes the inveterate occurance to occurrence and sometimes knows the difference between principle and principal. A spelling bee might sound like a clever idea in the early twentieth century, but nowadays, it has degraded into an ignoble sport. Let me add that this is my opinion, and if someone happens to express indignation at being exposed to it, all the blame goes to me, rather than to Oxford University Press, on whose site this blog appears every Wednesday.

The first Spelling Bee seems to go back to 1908. Below I will discuss a booklet on Spelling Reform, published almost at that time (in 1906). By the way, the origin of bee in spelling bee has never been explained to everybody’s satisfaction. Bee is a word of unknown etymology. It first surfaced in the US at the end of the eighteenth century and meant “a social gathering.” Perhaps it is the same word as the name of the insect: bees, as everybody knows, are great “gatherers.” In Derby, Whitby, and their likes, –by once meant “town; dwelling.” By(e) “cowstall,” with its variant bee, is still known in British dialects. Could this bee mean both “gathering place” and “the company gathered in it,” like court and forum? Just guessing.

Before the First World War, it seems that English spelling would soon be reformed, partly because several famous people supported the idea. On May 2, 1906, Walter W. Skeat gave a talk at the British Academy, and in the same year, a brochure with that speech was published by Oxford University Press. He explained why English spelling is so erratic and what progress philology had made by the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1908 (again the same date!), The English Spelling Society was founded. It advocated “simplified spelling,” The society still exists and is quite active. Today, philology enjoys no prestige, courses in the history of language (even of the English language) have fallen into desuetude, and a graduate student interested in this subject will find neither an adviser nor a job. But English spelling is still a nightmare to millions of native speakers and foreigners.

Below, I’ll only list Skeat’s suggestions, without discussing them. There are twelve of them. Skeat followed Henry Sweet, another great contemporary of his. 1. Abolish silent e, where it is useless (spell hav, giv, abuv, cum “come,” solv, freez, adz, ax). As we know, adz and ax are accepted variants in the US. 2. In the same spirit, write litl, promis, activ, therefor (in today’s spelling, therefore and the rare therefor are different words). 3. The use of ea for short e is absurd and troublesome. Write medow, brekfast, hed, as well as lepard, jepardy (the horror of it! Our beloved Jeopardy!), and also peeple. 4. The use of ie for ee is unhistorical and should be discontinued. Thus, acheev, beleev, cheef, feeld.

5. The Tudor (fifteenth-century) form oo should be restored in words like improov, looz, moov. 6. Norman scribes, while producing their manuscripts, had trouble with um, but there is no reason why we should avoid cumfort, cumpany, cum “come,” munk, muney, and cuver. 7. Skeat suggested curage, cuzin, flurish, and touch. His spelling labor, honor, harbor will not shock anyone in the US, but some of Skeat’s contemporaries feared looking like Americans. Times change (don’t they?), and some people change with them.

I’ll skip 8 and go directly to 9. Get rid of useless double letters. Thus, eg, od, ful, stif, batl, wrigl, traveler. (Needless to say, traveler is now the only American spelling.) 10. Skeat suggested abolishing b in debt, lamb, limb, numb, and thumb. 11. Ache and anchor should become ake and anker. 12. Here are a few verbal forms: puld, lookt, slipt.

At the end of his presentation, Skeat, as always, berated the ignorance and laziness of his countrymen, be it in language history or phonetics. I wonder what he would have said if he found himself in a modern college. He had no illusions about the future, and yet he thought he saw a glimmer of hope in some actions at Oxford and Cambridge. Of course, he could not predict that soon after his death in 1912, the world would collapse and, in a way, never recover. But we are still alive, and English is now a world language. Millions of children at home and in the great world around learn English and curse wright (God forbid, not write or right!), doubt, choir, and occurrence. Have I made myself clear? Was my éclaircissement lucid enough? If so, I am happy, because never in the world would I have been able to win the most modest prize in a deadly fight against bees.

_{Featured image: giant honey bee by Dinesh Valke. CC-BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.}