Riiven Slants
The Three Hundred Words
A country chose to keep spelling like a fifteenth-century printer rather than a president.
English writes ghost with an h nobody says and knight with a k nobody hears. Printers fixed these letters while the sounds were still moving, and the reformers who set out to correct them have mostly lost.
The Great Vowel Shift reshaped English pronunciation over roughly three centuries, and print standardized spelling while the shift was still under way. Caxton's Royal Book of 1484 carries the h in ghost, probably owed to printers who spoke Flemish.
Samuel Johnson's dictionary of 1755 ratified a consensus the printers had already reached. Noah Webster tried to bend it in America. Color, honor, center, and defense stuck. Tung, wimmen, bred, and fether did not. Webster won only where his changes still resembled the old words.
In 1906 Andrew Carnegie funded a Simplified Spelling Board. On August 27 of that year, Theodore Roosevelt wrote from Oyster Bay to Public Printer Charles A. Stillings. He ordered the three hundred spellings of Circular No. 5, among them thru and tho, into executive department publications.
The House answered in December by voting to withhold funds from any government document printed in the new style. The Senate never acted. Roosevelt rescinded the order the next day, less than four months after issuing it. The Chicago Tribune picked up the cause in 1934 with its own short list.
The Tribune kept printing simplified words for four decades, though the real retreat came in 1955. In 1975 the paper went back to through. The k in knight still marks a sound nobody has used in centuries.
The tilt
Roosevelt's order was gone in less than four months, and the printers' h is still in ghost after more than five centuries.
Sources
- Theodore Roosevelt, letter to Charles A. Stillings, 27 August 1906, reproduced in the Congressional Record (1906)
- “‘Thru’ Is Through As Chicago Tribune Ends Spelling Fight,” The New York Times (1975)
- “Moves for Simplification Turn Inglish into Another Langwaj,” Chicago Tribune (1997)
- David Crystal, The Stories of English (Penguin) (2004)
- Greg Daugherty, “Teddy Roosevelt’s Bold (But Doomed) Battle to Change American Spelling,” History.com
