Thru All My Thots
I AM not sure just when thoughts turned into thots, — rhyming, apparently, with dots, and probably as meaningless as a line of them, — but I am sure that anyone who thinks thots is damned. (Samuel Butler, you remember, consigned to eternal hell-fire the man who called trousers pants. A bit extreme. Purgatory would be sufficient for the man who wears gent’s pants; besides, we must reserve the lower realm for the thot-ful.) The phrase I am using for a caption I found in a student’s theme. Since the course was designed for those with some literary taste, I dropped the offender in favor of a man who, though he frequently misspelled, had the best intentions.
‘But,’ protested my assistant, a broad-minded fellow, ‘we cannot forbid a certain amount of simplified spelling. The students see it every week in such-and-such a magazine.’
I forbore to reply that the students see every day in the newspapers a variety of crimes, stylistic, narrative, and photographic, which not even the broadest mind would desire to find in their own practice. I did not remind him that out of a nation of ruminants a few perhaps overfastidious individuals reserve their right to abstain from chicle; that though the majority of men go without vests some still wear waistcoats. I did not point out any of these things, because he would have thought me a snob and a mossback. I merely inserted in the printed plan of the course a Law: So-called simplified spelling will not be acceptable — thus turning to a good cause (one’s own cause is always good) the legislative instinct so proper to a modern American.
Mr. Max Eastman, in a logical and scholarly essay on this subject, has pointed out the inconsistencies, the difficulties, the historical absurdity, of simplified spelling; for my part, I shall content myself with a few observations.
In the name of efficiency, then, why does a people which substitutes ‘naborhood’ for ‘neighborhood’ delight to keep ‘ye olde shoppe’? Having made night hideous with ‘nite,’ why does it preen itself in the mastery of a thousand and one names of new products, — Kal-co-voo-moo, Doo-mit-tal-tum, Ya-por-do-nol, — all with the correct pronunciation indicated in parenthesis and all entered in the United States Patent Office? In this country we cannot order things simply. We cannot say, ‘Let me have a tube of Doe’s toothpaste,’ or ‘Ten gallons of gasoline, please’; rather, ‘Have you any Sal-dent-enameline?’ or ‘Ten gallons of Yorktexicuttachusetts, please.’ Ridiculous! In the language of this extraordinary people who write ‘exprest ’ instead of ‘ expressed ’ for fear of a lost moment, a sofa becomes a ‘ daveno,’ a cottage a ‘maisonette,’ a flat an ‘apartment,’ a bay a ‘breakfast nook.’
If real efficiency, legitimate efficiency, is desired, why not quit simplified spelling and master simple English? The most inefficient document in the world is the modern business letter. Poverty of words necessitates a circumlocution where one syllable would do; attempts at elegance multiply phrases to bewildering jargon. Personal, even intimate, forms, wholly out of place and usually impertinent in a letter of the sort, waste ink and paper. If business men wish so ardently to save time and labor, why can they not sign themselves, as is proper, ‘yours truly,’ instead of ‘most cordially yours,’ that highly improper, not to say inefficient, phrase now so much in vogue among advertisers? I have proved (‘proven,’ our business man would write) to my own satisfaction, at least, that the type of mind hospitable to the new spellings is almost invariably the type which, with windy or dropsical verbiage, bloats expression.
Æsthetically the simplified forms are indefensible. A periodical which employs these forms reprints in every issue a selection of current verse, rewriting according to the taste of the editors. (I notice, by the bye, that although the poems are tampered with, the text of advertisements is left intact.) A poet seeing his work thus mutilated might well find grounds for a lawsuit. The editors have willfully altered his lines; they have removed his work from the traditional literature for which it was intended and have thereby injured the writer’s professional reputation. Any man who writes
and finds it reprinted
should be awarded substantial damages. Granted that poetry should communicate primarily through the ear; nevertheless, in modern practice the eye, too, absorbs some portion of the meaning through the arrangement in print. The second version of the line I have quoted is definitely ugly and against poetry. It brings upon its author the suspicion that he may have written it thus originally, and lowers him in the opinion of his readers — or at least readers of taste, to whom, presumably, the writer addresses himself.
But what proof have I that simplified spelling and what we vaguely call literature are incompatible? As I have hinted above, we have gone beyond provable fact and are dealing with matters of taste. I could, of course, point out that no reputable writer employs simplified spelling. I could fall back on Mr. Eastman’s arguments, though to do so would bring on me the danger of comparison with excellence. I could reprint a familiar classic in the new forms to shock my readers into agreement. But, in this subject, proof of any sort is nearly useless.
No, I cannot prove this case to anybody. The Victorians had a serviceable, though overworked, word to dispose of anything which, though not sinful, was not acceptable to cultivated men. They used it in describing shrill voices, false elegance, pretentiousness, and all the countless subtleties of bad form. I shall have to fall back on that. Simplified spelling is, in the full sense of the word, common. And good literature is never that.