Customer Reviews

Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling

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However you spell it, this is good fun if you like linguistics, etymology and orthography. Starting with the basics of Wessex (West Saxon) Old English (there never was an 'e' on old until Victorian times) the language grew from the influx of Norman-French (from William the Conqueror), and all the languages of the Empire (pundit, serendipity, kiosk). But how did the spelling of the actual words come to be?

Prior to the printed book, almost all books were hand scribed by monks in Scriptorium. (The building at Oxford where the OED was created was named so by sir James Murray.) Each monk spelled a word as close as he could to the way it sounded (phonetically). Since there were so few readers, it didn't really matter.

Once Guttenberg had devised his type-set printing, word spellings became much more important. The English (King James of 1611) translated Bible had different spellings for the same word, sometimes on the same page. As an aside, one of the reason we have odd spellings like 'ghost' instead of 'gost' was that the first English books were typeset in Bruges where the major language was Flemish. Typesetters made the decisions on the spot of how to spell a word (phonetically of course), and so used spellings they were comfortable with.

The first major shift to "standardize" English spellings, was by Dr. Samuel Johnson. Dr.Johnson's "Dictionary" was first published in 1755 and immediately became the "base line" (or war line) by which the budding science of 'philology' and 'lexicographers' (makers of dictionaries) fought the battle of the silent 'h' (in Ghost and Rhubarb) and silent 'gh' (in though and fought).

Noah Webster started the transatlantic lexicography war when he published his 'American Dictionary of the English Language' in 1828. Webster sought to 'americanize' English by changing gaol to jail, publick to public, centre to center and dropping the 'u' in honor, valor, color,etc.
This set off the longest running battle between the two major centers or centres of the English (?) speaking world.

In the late 1880's a group of men at Oxford, decided that the language needed to be standardized, because of the coming of government sanctioning of 'public' education. How to teach spelling and word meanings when there was no 'body' (such as the 'Academie Francais) to arbitrate the language. So the idea of the 'Oxford English Dictionary' was born. It took almost thirty years before it was completed in 1928 and it immediately became the standard for all publication in the UK and the British Empire. Americans are still making their own decisions.

With the advent of the internet and email, and especially cell phone 'texting', the language is once again developing a 'personalized' orthography. While there are accepted shorthand words such as Gr8 and BFF (best friends forever), there are a myriad of variations between friends and age groups. (No teenager wants to use the same shorthand as their parents, duh! how groudy!)

For those who enjoy a good story is how things came about (the eschatology) of any genre, this is a fun read (or reed or rede or ...

Zeb Kantrowitz

Here's author David Wolman's own explanation of what this book is:

"This book is my journey into the past and future of English spelling. It's an everyman's review of how the words of our language acquired their current form, a study of the quest to change the spelling code, and an exploration of spelling convention and innovation in the digital age."

That sums it up pretty well. It's an everyman's book in the double sense that it's written by a nonexpert and is pitched at people who want an overview with interesting facts, ideas and illustrative detail but not extended scholarly analysis. The information is generally derived from authoritative sources, often books written by language scholars for a general audience. Explanations are lucid.

Emphasis should be given to "my journey," as a fair amount of the book revolves around Wolman's trips to places of significance in his take on the history and future of English spelling. He travels to several places in Britain where events such as the Norman Conquest and the English translation of the Bible occurred, takes a side trip to Germany and Belgium, homes of Gutenberg and the first English printed book, visits the home of famous American dictionary author Noah Webster, the Scripps National Spelling Bee, the home of Google in Silicon Valley, and other places along the way, usually accompanied by an expert who helps explain the significance of the events related to the places. It's like one of those BBC TV history specials without a camera crew.

His journey is also personal in the sense that he weaves in his own history with spelling, from a lifelong self-perception as a bad speller to his participation in a local spelling bee.

The narrative is leisurely and somewhat rambling, in a pleasant way, with frequent detours from one thread to another.

A major thread throughout the book concerns the controversy over how much emphasis should be put on proper spelling and what proper spelling should be understood to be. Should we care if a word is spelled unconventionally as long as we can easily understand it? Is it desirable or possible to reform spelling? Wolman seems to side with a laissez-faire approach, but he doesn't call for less emphasis on correct spelling in school or the like, so it isn't clear is he has a fully worked out position of his own.

Wolman finally considers reasons to worry about where spelling is headed but basically ends up at "the kids are all right." (I was hoping for some more robust tying up of ends about the controversies of spelling.)

The book is enjoyable and interesting, a fairly quick read.

Quibbles and ruminations inspired by the book

Wolman sees the importance of the spelling differences between words like 'desert' and 'dessert', but he doesn't see the significance of the differences between 'hare-brained' and 'hair-brained', or 'strait-jacket'/'strait-laced' and 'straight-jacket'/'straight-laced' (68). I think the differences in the latter cases are significant, as they convey different root images or ideas. Having the brain of a small animal is a different idea than having a brain with some quality related to hair (whether it be that hair is all there is in the head, or the thinness of a hair, or whatever). Both might naturally mean "stupid," but by different routes. Similarly, the idea of narrow or tight in 'strait' is very different than whatever might be conveyed by 'straight' in the examples given. ('Straight' actually works with 'straight-laced' but in its own distinctive way.)

Wolman suggests that spelling may change more quickly because of the internet, which is largely unedited. He cites in particular Google's enabling bad or alternative spelling with its "Did you mean ...?" search function. Things do change faster and and faster, and he may be right, but I think it could work more the other way, that bad spellers will now be reminded of correct spellings by Google, and by spellcheckers, which are more and more integrated into web-related applications, and have been improving my spelling, at least. I think these things may actually tend to slow the change of most spelling.

There are of course practical benefits to uniformity of spelling, which requires a common standard, but it feels like more is involved. Excuse the image, but I once had a very learned professor who said misspelling is like picking your nose in public, which I take to mean that it's a violation of manners. It is curious that we, or some of us, at least, do tend to feel about misspelling the way we might about holding our dinner fork with a fist while eating. But even if they're sometimes arbitrary, there is something to be said for having good manners about our forks and so on, and for drawing some limited inferences about people based their adherence to such niceties. They show something about our training and our willingness or ability to participate in social forms, rather like a dance we're all supposed to know the steps to and perform together. The steps may sometimes be arbitrary, but there's a grace in knowing them and doing them correctly.

This is an interesting -- though not totally captivating -- read about the history of spelling in the English language. While, as a professional copy editor and general fan of etymology, good spelling, good grammar and all things word-related, I enjoyed it, it may be a bit dry for those who don't already have an interest in this area.

The book starts with the history of the English language and continues through the days of Noah Webster, early-20th-century spelling reformers and up till texting and the Internet (and their effect on the English language).

The cover design could be more attractive -- I don't find it particularly compelling or even reflective of the book's content. And this is definitely no "Eats, Shoots and Leaves." But overall, if you're really fascinated by spelling and how modern English came to be the way it is, you'll find this a fun read.

You know, my father used to drive people crazy by complaining that so many words in the English language are not spelled the way they sound. Well, it turns out that my father was in good company. Throughout the history of the English language, many great men of letters complained about spellings, and have sought to reform the language to make it easier to understand. In this fascinating book, author David Wolman tells the tortured and twisted history of the English language, and the many attempts to reform its spelling.

Overall, I found this to be a very interesting book. The author takes what could easily have been a boring subject, and makes it come alive, as he tells of his own peregrinations as he works to unravel the history of why we spell words the way we do. It was so interesting, the way that men fought bitter and usually unsuccessful battles to change spelling, while often it changed of its own accord, unmarked and unheralded.

This is a very interesting book on what turns out to be a very interesting subject. If you are interested in the written word, then you really should get this book. I highly recommend it!

I thoroughly enjoyed this brief, well-written history of the development of English spelling and its often bizarre conventions. While the thread that ties the chapters together is the spelling of English words, the author successfully incorporates fascinating bits of linguistics, cultural and social history, and biography to bring his subject to life.

The author's style is fresh and engaging and the book is very readable and in fact difficult to put down. I've read many books about linguistics and language history, and most suffer from a scholarly tone that sometimes borders on the pedantic. This book is a welcome change from that, and will appeal both to the general reader as well as those of us who love reading about language and language change.

While the author is not a professional linguist, he includes footnotes for each chapter and it's obvious that he researched his topic before writing the book. Highly recommended!

...and most of us--even those of us who love etymology--aren't that crazy about reading dictionaries. That is part of it. The other is the getting of the history of words with a dictionary is haphazard at best.

Along comes "Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling." I know of no other book quite like it. I love June Casagrande's Mortal Syntax: 101 Language Choices That Will Get You Clobbered by the Grammar Snobs--Even If You're Right and Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies: A Guide to Language for Fun and Spite and even Lynn Truss's unforgiving British take on punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. I remember reading a book on the origins of the alphabet back in the early 60s. This, however, is the only one I know that capsulates the history of spelling (more or less).

I found it funny and disturbing. (I don't suppose one expects a book on spelling to be disturbing.) But take the word "e-mail." As an editor I've been fighting to keep the hyphen because the word is short for electronic mail and the hyphen preserves that origin. There! There on the cover is "e-mail" spelled "email." Guess I'm fighting a losing battle. Which, after all, is the point of this book.

Don't let the fact that you now know the point keep you from reading it. If you love words and history, you'll be entertained.

Thank you, David Wolman.
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Reviewed by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, UCLA Extension Writers' Program instructor and author of The Frugal Editor.

I came to this book pretty fresh from a linguistics class that focused on language change. We spent a lot time discussing the values of standardization and whether spelling and grammar should be governed. I was kind of bored with these debates, probably because they lacked context. So when I started reading Wolman's book, I was surprised to find myself feeling excited, emotional, inspired, and sometimes even angry, over the stories he was sharing.

This book helped me understand some folks' enthusiasm for spell check or text messaging--and others' resistance to them--and made me see them in the context of centuries of language change. Wolman introduces his readers to a number of personalities (dead and alive) who sort of act as guides and make the book relatable. Learning about orthography from multiple characters in different places and times really made it click for me: spelling is a living thing, as much about the human voice as the written word.

I also appreciated Wolman's ability to remain open and curious throughout his journey. He's upfront about his own perspective, but he really just offers the reader a starting point for thinking about the future of words and spelling. It was a fantastic introduction to orthography, leaving me appropriately awed and curious. And I'll never look at a spelling mistake the same again.

This is an odd book about what has to be one of the most disjointed languages ever. English drew heavily from two very different linguistic bases--Germanic and Romance languages. The result--a language that frequently is at a loss to express itself phonetically. Many of the rigid, relentless spellings driven into our heads by a whole host of inflexible teachers have only been around for a short time. Way back when, printers changed spellings of words between pages and paragraphs, often in response to how many letters they had at hand. The language's spelling has been unstable ever since.

This book does a great job of revealing the history odd quirks of spelling and usage, particularly showing how English and...well, "American" have gone their separate ways. Funny, engrossing. And a perfect ego salve for those of us who still can't spell worth a....

This is a fantastic book for anyone that has ever read The Professor and the Madman. The history and state of language is a fascinating three nights of reading for anyone, regardless of whatever genre you usually find yourself immersed in.

Written in a reminiscent tone of a Docent leading you on a Museum tour through the ever changing landscape of the English language, Wolman speaks to the reader directly in a sometimes wry and sometimes dry narrative, but nothing too troublesome. I was able to quickly get through this as I was fascinated by how certain words have evolved and what the language is currently facing with the ever changing world of the internet, text messaging and the American public at large.

While this is a very fascinating book and I whole-heartedly give it five stars, I would also recommend the following examples of what encapsulates some of Wolman's concerns:

1. The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

2. The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms

3. Urban Dictionary: Street Slang Defined

4. Depraved and Insulting English

5. The Highly Selective Dictionary For The Extraordinarily Literate

6. The Oxford Dictionary of Allusions

7. How Not To Say What You Mean: A Dictionary of Euphemisms

This is a great book if you are a logophile or just like fun little bits of history. It is a quick tour of the vagaries of the evolution of spelling in the English language, and it packed some tasty surprises for me.

As a lover of words, word origins, and such, I fell in love with this book in the first few paragraphs. Wolman writes about what could be a very dry subject to some, but manages to be interesting and engaging. It was hard for me to put this book down.

From the school-age tortures of spelling and spelling bees through a quick history of printing and dictionaries, to the current battles over email and texting, Wolman acts as our guide, showing us seldom mentioned influences in English orthography (spelling). In the process, he is entertaining as well as informative, not an easy mix.

I was surprised to learn how much influence Dutch printers had on the standardization of spelling in English. There are many more such tidbits of interesting history in here, and I found myself thinking about English and language in whole new ways. I like it when someone can create new perspectives for me, and Wolman opened my mind up, big time.

This was an enlightening and entertaining read, and I heartily recommend it if you love words, history, or related subjects. Wolman adds another dimension to a Harry Truman quote that I find more and more relevant every day - "The only new thing is the history you don't know."