Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 September 1877 — Ridicule and Reform in Spelling. [ARTICLE]

Ridicule and Reform in Spelling.

Ridicule is a powerful weapon, and it is as often used in a bad cause as a good revolver is. Indeed, the temptation to use it to further the ends of injustice is supreme, for derision will often serve to discredit an experiment or an opinion where logic would find no room to stand. Thus we see it summoned to promote fraud, hunkerism and retrogression. The Cincinnati Commercial turns it agaiifet the commendable movement to reform the barbarous spelling of the English language. Here the weapon is very effective, and is so simple that a child can fire it off. “ What can be thought of a mode of spelling,” says the facetious Commercial, “in which ‘come’ appears as * kum,’ and ‘ knowledge ’ takes tiie form of ‘ nolej! ’ ” And the question seems by the querist to be settled, and the projected reform overthrown forever. The Commercial reproduces some specimens of the proposed alphabets, applied to a paragraph, in order to ridicule their grotesqueness, and this is aggravated by numerous typographical errors, averaging about one for each three words. The effect thus becomes very ludicrous indeed.

We arc slaves of the eye. Mr. Robert Bonner recently said, with the sagacity which has given him success, “People cannot bear to change their habits suddenly. For one issue of a paper to look differently from the preceding issue offends the readers—it seems like an intrusion and an insult, and they resent it. Why, sir, I wouldn’t change the title of one of the departments of the Ledger, even for a better one, for $1,000." This characteristic of the human mind is the chief foe of all improvements and all reforms, but preeminently is it an obstruction to the phonetic reform, which appeals to the prejudices of the conservative eye. The abominable and unreasonable “phthisic” seems at sight better than “tizik,” though the former is wildly wrong and the latter precisely right. But if it is true, and it certainly seems to be, that if the language were spelled as it is pronounced, every child would save a year now waited on spelling, to apply it to valuable acquirements; and if it is true that the State would save half the money now spent on primaiy education, is it not worth thinking about ? And is it quite the thing for intelligent journals tc befog their readers by ridiculing it?—W. Y. Oraphic.