Spelling Reform for Wayward Words.

Not to pedant at you, but the link to Chi Luu’s article appears to be pointing to their fantastic taboo article from June? Still an excellent, but not the one you intend?

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m of the opinion that there are plenty of English words (a small percentage of the whole, but still a large number) that could benefit from moderate spelling reform, along the lines of what the French Academy does for French. The “sc” in “scythe” is as silly as the former “sç” in French “sçavoir,” and in my opinion should go the same way to the dustbin of orthographic history. The silent “p” in “receipt”, besides being unnecessary, breaks the pattern of “conceit” and “deceit.” And of course “island” is notorious for the stupidity of its spelling. For me, the same instinct that makes me enjoy the true etymological relics makes me irritated by the fake ones.

In some cases the pronunciation has caugh up with the artificial spelling (like the pseudo-learned th in author, ph in nephew for many speakers). What they did to poor scythe in the 15th century was nothing short of orthographic vandalism. There are more words in need of repair: whelk (OE weoloc), could (the false l has never been pronounced), delight (from earlier delite), aisle (another victim of the contagious s in isle → island), etc. But there is often an interesting story (or a real mystery) behind the mismatch of sound and spelling (cf. such oddities as colonel and the UK pronunciation of lieutenant), and it would be a pity if an orthographic reform wiped out such time-honoured curiosities. It isn’t likely to happen anyway.

I don’t. On aesthetic grounds, I hold that mistakes that old have the same right as actual etymological relics to a place in the the cabinet of curiosities that is English orthography. (As a compromise, I would be fine with adding “sithe” as an acceptable spelling of the word, so that people who don’t care about pseudo-Scythians can live free of their tyranny.)

I don’t like this idea of rational spelling in English. It will leave those of us who are (inexplicably) good at spelling with nothing to brag about.

I remain in favor of moderate reform.

The same shortened spellings that appear in sms messages have also appeared independantly in other situations where English needs to be conveyed in a limited number of characters. E.g. the early talker programs attached to the bulletin boards of the ’80s which were the predecessors to muds, IRC and later instant messaging services.

Sacrilege, Mr Creown! It would not do to have variations in spelling! What would we teach the children? It is common knowledge that children must be taught a single invariable rule; the alternative is to confuse their unformed minds. They need guidance, not choices!

I don’t know if variant spellings were useful when sending telegrams — since they had to go through an operator, that sort of money-saving tricks might have been disallowed. The operators of course had their own set of codes (CQ and all that), but that’s another thing.

Telex machines, on the other hand, were often operated by people with no special training, and at 10 characters per second and 10 – 20 dollars per minute (1970 dollars!) when talking to Singapore and places like that, incentives to briefness were strong. My father worked in shipping, and I remember watching messages tick in on the Teletype machine — but the only specific thing I remember now is ‘asap’ which of course is an acronym/initialism. (There was no provision for letter case in the code, and punctuation also tended to go missing, as I remember).

Good practice for anything over a few words was to compose off line, to paper tape, and then run off the message at line speed to the other end. Lost technologies… but there might actually be archives of such tapes somewhere, and I wonder if anybody has looked at the usages.

Telegraph companies varied over time with what to allow: sometimes only words that could be pronounced, which led to books describing how to create millions of satisfactory character strings, eg

https://books.google.com/books?id=7FYlcgAACAAJ

(no preview, Google only knows why)

along with code books mapping then-common phrases into single words; for example, the (now) rather startlingly-titled “Unicode” from 1886

https://books.google.com/books?id=W2U0AAAAMAAJ

From David Kahn’s The Codebreakers, pp. 851-53 of the unabridged edition:

The rise and fall of an industry is not a new story in the history of the world. As a business, the making of nonsecret codes is as dead as armor making or buggy-whip making. Did it have any aftereffect on civilization, after fulfilling its function of helping that civilization advance? Did it leave anything beyond hundreds of dusty tomes filled with outmoded references to ships being coaled and defunct names like St. Petersburg [ha!], and some lessons in codeword construction?

There is one thing that may be distilled from any human experience because it represents the universal, and that is art. Commercial codemaking stimulated the best humor in cryptology — a small contribution to the store of the world’s art, but one that gives lasting pleasure nonetheless. The author, Jack Littlefield, offered some “Melancholy Notes on a Cablegram Code Book” to the readers of the July 28, 1934, issue of The New Yorker [subscribers only, alas] — the code in question being the Acme.

Every time I receive a cablegram in code, I have the same feeling of pleasurable excitement. There is the familiar envelope lying on my desk, marked “Cablegram: Urgent.” I rip it open and discover inside the single mysterious word BIINC. The message is from our Venezuela office. Visions at once loom of secret documents, beautiful women, and dark Latin-American intrigue. Then I turn to my code book and find BIINC: What appliances have you for lifting heavy machinery? This sort of thing can be very debilitating.

It is not the fault of the code book, either. That handy volume is full of interesting messages that my correspondents never seem to get around to sending. For years I have been on the watch for wires like NARVO (Do not part with the documents), OBNYX (Escape at once), ARPUK (The person is an adventurer, have nothing to do with him), or BUKSI (Avoid arrest if possible), but they never seem to arrive. And yet, if the code book is to be believed, they are fair samples of the kind of thing with which our telegraph wires are humming daily.

Not all the code-book suggestions, of course, are on this high level of adventure. Our telegraph-users, it would seem, have a wide range of concerns. At this very moment a perplexed customer in some distant part of the globe is inquiring URPXO (For what use was the mixing machine intended?); in the next town, perhaps a ship’s captain is reporting diffidently ELJAZ (Will have to get bottom examined before proceeding); while somewhere a new parent is voicing his elation in the form of AROJD (Please advertise the birth of twins).

The dominating note of the code book, however, is one of resigned melancholy. Its pages are replete with such gloomy sentiments as ZULAR (Unfortunately too true) and CULKE (Bad as possibly can be), expressions that seem only too justified when we consider the extraordinary series of disasters that has been stored up for users of the code. Every possible variety of mishap has been foreseen and embalmed in a group of doleful entries ranging from the comparatively trivial AIBUK, which describes the bursting of a donkey boiler, to the truly cataclysmic PYTUO (Collided with an iceberg). […]

[A one-page lacuna in Google Books here. I remember a series of similarly gloomy codewords meaning Captain drunk, Captain not to be found, Captain refuses to leave vehicle, Captain insane, and (none too soon) Arrest the Captain.]

[… The above code word] is a monument of utility beside the picturesque YBTUA, which deals with the transportation to Mecca of pilgrims — at the prevailing price per head! And however much I may regret my inability to send a message like WUMND (Have every reason to believe oil will be struck), at least I feel certain that I shall never rise, Phoenix-like, from my own ashes to cable that most fantastic of all code words, AHXNO: Met with a fatal accident.

No, for the Acme was written in 1923, and the first practicable hovercraft didn’t exist until 1959, though a prototype version existed as early as 1915, and it wasn’t really commercialized until 1968.

The Hoover Constellation is particularly fascinating: “Hovercraft!” “Vacuum cleaner!” “Hovercraft!” ….

“Compression, Correction, Confidentiality, and Comprehension: A Look at Telegraph Codes” by Steven Bellovin (once a demigod in the Unix dharma line at Bell Labs) says that Kahn was mistaken: the code was the A B C Telegraphic Code, Sixth Edition. Even those not interested in the technicalities of cryptology may enjoy some of the code word meanings: my favorite is now REVERE, from the private Stoneham &amp Co. code book of 1910, meaning ‘Wires being down, your telegram did not reach us in time to transact any business today, and as your orders are good for the week, we will try to execute tomorrow.’

and almost every noun in them is accompanied by a single epithet, namely, f—ing.

Pish and tosh, sir. It’s not a f—ing epithet. It’s been f—ing grammaticalized as a f—ing intensifier. (And the b—y competition has sorted itself out to other b—y topolects.)

It’s astonishing how perfucktory many people are as to how they speak.