Hard Times Can Grate on Spelling Snobs

An online article on MSNBC this morning caught my eye because it pointed out that people who are spelling snobs (a fairly disturbed minority of which I am, admittedly, a member) can get particularly upset because when there is so little under their control they feel we could AT LEAST spell things correctly. I have to agree, an economic downturn does not have to be accompanied by a dowturns in our ability to spell words correctly, or worse, to properly use rapidly degrading colloquial American English. I don't hold out for the King's English, but at least the basics were were taught in school ought to shore us up when times get tough and continue to separate us from lower beings on the food chain.

I can take the plummeting value of my home and my 401k. I can shoulder additional burdens of higher health care costs and the need for me to increase my productivity as a professional to retain any facsimile of my former standard of living. But, for the love of Webster, can we please TRY to spell correctly!

Now, I'm not a fanatic like some of those cited in the MSNC article, who would not even patronize a Krispy Kreme donut shop because of the Ks. Frankly, all of the Krispy Kremes in my town have long since been shuttered, and I wasn't a particular fan of the taste of everything dipped in sugar after deep frying, although a warm glazed from Krispy Kreme did pass my lips a time or two. I'm more a muffin or oatmeal person, and I prefer a cake donut with little adulteration. I'm not even going to address the irony that they named the store Krispy Kreme but retained the traditional spelling of 'doughnut' over 'donut'. They are really dough rings anyway, if we're going to be precise.

I also hope the reader will note that I used single marks and not quotation marks around the words doughnut and donut. According to Webster, donut is a suitable variation of doughnut, and they both mean a ring shaped cake fried in fat, so no need for quotation marks, as I am not quoting anyone. I do not get apoplectic over the overuse of quotation marks, even the ones we make with our fingers when speaking conversationally to our friends. However, if you use the term 'comfortability', you may earn my ire. I say 'term', because comfortability is not a word. It does not exist in Merriam Webster and has only recently shown up in so-called urban dictionaries of general colloquial misuse. One has a comfort level, not comfortability, with a topic or a situation. A vehicle offers relative comfort, not comfortability. And I suppose, in tough economic times when I am working so much harder for a living I probably appreciate such misuse even less, because it speaks to a certain linguistic ignorance on the part of the speaker, and in my line of work being well spoken is an important attribute. Yes, I guess in these hard times one ought not approach me on a street corner and inquire, index and pointing fingers of each hand cocked,as to my comfortability with a proposed strategy.

I suppose the truth is, hard times come and go and grammarians, good spellers and bad spellers alike, all of us must adapt to survive; but we don't need to dumb down our culture and speech in the process. When Scarlett O'Hara ranted at the end of "Gone with the Wind" (a movie title, thus the quotation marks), "With God as my witness, I will never be poor again!" her word choice alone was elevating. Beaten down by war, the death of her only child and the loss of her great love, her beloved Tara in ashes along with all of Atlanta, Miss Scarlett needed to adequately express her own might and her need to be bigger than circumstances in the future. Use of 'ain't' or a dreaded double negative simply would not do in that situation or the reader (or viewer in the case of the film) would sincerely doubt Scarlett's ability to rise up again. If you read Gone with the Wind (now properly underlined as it is the title of a book), you will not find a single misspelling, and any grammatical errors occur only in quoted speech. Similarly, a review of the script of the screen classic "Casablanca" reveals gem after gem of correctly spelled and grammatically irreproachable speech. In viewing the film one also notes that in Casablanca, a then French speaking country in Africa, the restaurant name on the wall is correctly spelled "Rick's Cafe' Americain'. The writers might not have immediately regretted using the American spelling, but they would have soon, and for the rest of their lives.

The point of this Rooneyesque rumination is really that when times get hard we ought to aspire to linguistic, grammatical and spelling perfection. We really can control little else, but proof positive that we will rise up again, stronger, better, is almost always found in the tenor and quality of our everyday speech and writing. Just as we economize elsewhere to reduce our spending, so too can we economize speech to make it crisper, sharper, more erudite and effective all at once. We needn't break down three good words into one or two poor ones (or reduce ourselves to text-speak in the form of 'cuz, UR and OMG), though, and we should always read back over what we've written to double-check for any spelling errors. Failing to give a second look to a written line has resulted in several 'pubic' errors by otherwise fine writers or chroniclers, and with all the other worries we have bearing down upon us, do we really want to join those ranks?