I received a question about the origin of dildo. It so happens that long ago I already wrote a post devoted to this word (“Back and Forth on a Cold Spoor of an Obscenity”). OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
I received a question about the origin of dildo. It so happens that long ago I already wrote a post devoted to this word (“Back and Forth on a Cold Spoor of an Obscenity”). The post, which, to my surprise, elicited no comments, appeared on February 14, 2007, and initially I wanted to refer my correspondent to it. But when I reread that essay, composed almost twenty years ago, I realized that today I can offer a more substantive text.
Since 2007, I have been busy working on a dictionary of English etymology and on a bibliography of articles and books pertaining to the origin of English words and phrases. I have also published a good deal (both articles and books) on those subjects. As I result, I now feel more confident than in 2007 and can even risk offering unorthodox hypotheses, mildly unafraid of dissent: if somebody disagrees with me, I take the criticism in stride. Experience kills or at least blunts sensitivity. So here is another (and I dare hope a more definitive) attack on dildo. Incidentally, my huge database does not contain a single note on this word, and all the conclusions offered below are my own.
It may be useful to provide the context for the etymology of dildo and its lookalikes. Dildo (that is, dil-do) sounds like a playful formation: compare do-do, pooh-pooh, fee-fi-fo-fum, heehaw, and other similar words and phrases. One of them is the Russian noun dylda “a tall lanky youth,” not unexpectedly, a noun of rather obscure origin. The Russian verb doldonit’ (stress on the second syllable) means “to repeat something in an irritatingly monotonous way.”
From English, some people may remember dilly-danders as part of a riddle about a cow (“Four stiff-standers, four dilly-danders, two lookers, two crookers, and a wiggle-waggle”; dilly-danders are, apparently, the cow’s teats—no connection with dandruff or dander “an outburst of temper”; two crookers are the horns, two lookers are the eyes, and four stiff-standers are the legs). Not unexpectedly, the noun dandy, of course, like dandruff and dander, of disputed etymology, belongs to the same group of d-l, d-n words. Other than that, dildo is structured like bimbo.
F. C. Birkbeck Terry, an erudite contributor to Notes and Queries, wrote (8/X, Dec.12, 1896, p. 473): “With regard to dilly-danders, if we consider dilly to have a diminutive sense, we may compare the expressive dilly pig, the smallest pig of a litter, where dilly probably is an abbreviated form of dilling, which is used for the youngest of a family.” According to the OED, the word dilling has been known from books since the second half of the sixteenth century. Obviously, all words (simple or compound) of this type are onomatopoeias. References to onomatopoeia should be made with caution. For instance, the conjunction till, the plant name dill, and the adjective dull are not sound-imitative! Dill will resurface in our story later.
Is this dilling WIllbur from E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web? Photo by Forest S. via Unsplash.
In this context, I may mention the origin of the noun doll, also first recorded in the sixteenth century. (See a charming image of a doll in the header.) If Margaret can become Peggy, and Jacob “morph” into James, Dorothy can be easily transformed into Dolly. This is true, but with all due caution, I would like to provide some context for doll. In Low German and in Middle Dutch, dolle and dulle meant “a round piece of wood,” and dolls were often carved from such pieces. By the way, dyl-, the root of Russian dylda, mentioned above, also means “a piece of wood”!
Next to them, we find Scots dollop “a large shapeless lump,” another sixteenth-century word. (There seems to have been a regular epidemic of slangy d-l words in that century.) It has been suggested that dollop is perhaps of Scandinavian origin, because Norwegian dialectal dolp means “lump.” But, more likely, dollop is doll– with the suffix borrowed from trollop “a woman of loose morals” and other words ending in –op. Against this background, doll may not even have needed Dorothy to acquire its present meaning: it simply merged with the pet name. Doll looks like a so-called migratory word (Wanderwort, to use a common German term), that is, a word travelling from language to language, and it is usually hard to decide where it originated.
Against this background, we can now look at dildo, one more (late) sixteenth-century word. The OED online says “origin unknown,” and in this verdict it concurs with the original OED (the volume with the letter D appeared in 1897). What does it mean to “know” a word’s origin? The plant name dill has existed in English since the oldest period, and it has cognates in West and North Germanic. But why dill? And dollop? Also, think of dude, dawdle, doodle, and even dale. The same thing (“origin unknown”), though a few of such words have related forms all over the map. Discovering an ancient root is not the same as understanding why the word means what it does. Against this macabre background, let us ask what we “know” about the origin of dildo.
Here is the explanation from The Century Dictionary: “A term of obscure or cant origin, used in old ballads and plays as a mere refrain or nonsense-word; also used, from its vagueness, as a substitute for various obscene terms, and in various obscene meanings.” A typical example of such a refrain from a ballad sounded so: “With a little dildo dill and a dildo dee.” (Don’t miss the picture of the greatest ballad collector in the English-speaking world! His biography can be easily found online.) Even the original OED called a spade a spade, that is, said that dildo means “penis, phallos.” Old synonyms for dildo are equally obscure and on the face of it meaningless: pellicock, pintle, nonino, and so forth.
Francis J. Child (1825-1896), a great collector of English ballads. Daderot. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
English dildo and nonino, as well as phrases like dildodee and dildo dill, with their recurring sounds, rather obviously refer to the sexual act. They are meant to convey information (in this case, “up and down, there and back”) by their form. Such are also pooh-pooh, tick-tock, pitter-patter, rat-a-tat, and dozens of others. Dildo could refer to “copulation,” “penis,” and somewhat unexpectedly “vagina.” The meaning of the last word in the phrase the hair on herdiddy-di-dum (cited in the OED) is unambiguous.
Here then is my suggestion that I find reasonable but for which I am not ready to go to war. Dildo seems to be what linguists sometimes call “coinage,” a word created for the nonce. It was a nonsense word (the pun is unintended), whose phonetic form conveyed its scurrilous meaning. This, I think, is all we should know about its etymology. “Origin known”? Perhaps.
Next week, if I have enough space for a postscript, I’ll say something about the etymology of the verb dally, to clarify the meaning of the phrases “origin unknown” and “origin known.”
Language is often said to be most memorable when it is aspirational and inspirational, capturing a momentous event in history. If you are asked to give an example, you may respond by quoting John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream,” or Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” These iconic quotes are important ones for their attention to rhetorical devices and their ability to call others to action or bring calm to a crisis. I’m sure you can think of other examples.
However, I’m convinced that there is more to memorable language than inspirational speeches. I suspect that each of us has a mental list of words and phrases that have stuck in our heads and that power our own rhetoric. These are bits of language that we marveled at when we first encountered them and which pop back into our heads when we are striving for eloquence, drama, or wit. Memorable language can be a description, a clever lead-in, or an unusual word or phrase. Here are a few that are stuck in my head.
Years ago, I read a piece on the chemistry of flavors by the writer Raffi Khatchadourian in which he described a young scientist’s office by saying, “Her office resembles a walk-in high-school locker, if such a thing existed.” The first line about the walk-in locker organized all the rest of the description. By first inviting us to imagine something that doesn’t exist, he opened us up to the details that followed.
A memorable phrasing can also change the way we see a text. When I read Louis Menand’s 2002 article “Cat People,” I encountered his take that The Cat in the Hat turns on “the trope of the mater abscondita.” That phrase—the concealed mother—turned the story upside down. I could no longer think of Sally and her brother without wondering where the mother went and why.
Sometimes a memorable line can be a single non-standard usage. A mentor of mine once told me that it was important to have warmth, but that one also needed “coolth.” He didn’t explain, but it was clear to me that the expression referred to a Rudyard Kipling-like composure when things were spinning out of control. I reach for my inner coolth when things get hairy. And the originality of that expression led me to think about other word contrasts. I once described someone as not only possessing gravitas but levitas as well. It was a faux Latin word intended to capture the fact that the person in question was serious but not serious to a fault.
A description can also change the way you think of someone. Reading an obituary of the chess champion Boris Spassky, I came across just such a phrase. Spassky was known to have an imperturbable playing demeanor. The usual way to describe Spassky’s coolth under pressure would be with the term “poker face.” But chess is not poker, so something more evocative was needed. Tigran Petrosian, the player Spassky defeated in 1969, described Spassky’s demeanor as a “theatrical calm,” and Spassky himself called it his “clown’s face.” Replacing the commonplace gambling image with the operatic one created a powerful new mental image for me. I felt that I understood Spassky better.
What about you? As you think of your own reading and writing, what memorable lines have shaped your prose?
How does language express the idea of holiness? In the pagan pantheon, the gods performed all kinds of deeds, were great, vengeful, crafty, and sometimes outwitted by their divine enemies. When they were called “holy,” the reference should probably be understood as “deserving worship.” Such seems to have been the case in the phrase holy gods in Old Icelandic. Since before the Conversion, the word for “god” in that language occurred only in the neuter plural (!), and its sphere of application was radically different from what we find in Christian texts. The line between the sacral and the profane was observed, and blasphemy invoked death, but it was only in the monotheistic Christian world that God became holy in our sense of the word (“separated from sin, morally perfect”).
Holy Family by Michelangelo. Image by Michelangelo viaWikimedia Commons. Public domain.
Holy, which means the same as Latin sanctus, is related to English hallow and whole. Ignore the w in whole: nothing in the entire, whole (!) history of this adjective justifies the existence of the initial letter. It was perhaps added to distinguish the word from hole.
Whole goes back to Old Englishhāl, and its cognates were Gothichails, Old Icelandic heill, (Old High) German heil, and so forth. Germanic had a synonym of hails. Such was Gothic weihs, whose cognate, for some reason, left no traces in Modern English, though it had some limited currency in the old period. In Old Icelandic, the word vé “temple,” related to weihs, existed. The last letter in the Danish place name Odense (to give just one example) is a relic of that word. Odense meant “Odin’s sanctuary.” In the header, you can see Odense today: no trace of the old temple!
An old joke ‘Oxford is a (w)hole and should be viewed as such’. Photo by Chensiyuan viaWikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
It is unclear why the translator(s) of the Gothic Bible preferred weihs to hails, but a competition of synonyms for “sacred, holy” is not fortuitous. What is sacred/holy may have positive or negative connotations: “charged with divine presence” versus “forbidden for men to contact.” Such is, for example, the situation in Latin: sacer versus sanctus. The same juxtaposition existed in Ancient Greek: ieorós versus ágios (those unfamiliar with Greek may remember the name Hieronymus and the English word hagiography “a biography of a saint.” Whether Wulfila’sArianism (later branded as the Arian heresy) had anything to do with his word choice remains unclear. For fun, I asked AI about it. The answer is a bunch of nonsense. I was very pleased: it is not every day one can outwit such a clever machine.
Let me now come down from my sublime heights and mention another word of the group under discussion, namely, heal. It means to make one “whole.” Whole has been discussed above. In an article by a German linguist who dealt with the religious vocabulary of English, I read a passage from the book The Kingfishers CatchFire. “‘What is heal’, asked Teresa. ‘It is to make whole’, said Dr. Glenister [apparently, a missionary]. ‘Our Lord touched the lepers and blind men and made them whole.” That’s all there is to it as long as we talk to little girls. At the scholarly level, the problem is less simple, partly because heal is related to holy.
We have no evidence that holy was used as a religious term in Germanic before the advent of Christianity. Some researchers suggested that the word had once meant “inviolable”; others reconstructed it as “propitious, lucky, good.” The most ancient form of holy sounded approximately like hail-ag-az. The word also existed without the suffix ag (the English protoform was hailaz), and a strange suffix it was: we are supposed to believe that it did not affect the meaning of the words in which it occurred! But it probably did—only etymologists have no way of discovering its role. In any case, holy once referred to being healthy, and in English, it produced the idea of being whole.
Holy and whole (whole was recorded only in Middle English) are almost identical twins: they go back to hail-ig-az and hail-az respectively. If we ignore the suffix –ig, which, seemingly, did not affect the word’s sense in any way known to us, we will arrive at the same protoform. A word for “whole, complete” could easily denote “moral and spiritually perfect”—one step from “holy.” I owe this conclusion to the 1960 paper by Professor Gustav Must.
The problems touched on, rather than discussed, above have been at the center of Germanic scholarship for at least two centuries, and my modest goal was only to show how linguistics, history, and the history of religion converge in solving some mysteries of etymology.
My response to the comments on the previous post
Etymology
Question: What is the authority for the word joy or its protoform being borrowed from Greek?
Joy surfaced in English texts only in the thirteenth century. Could I have a reference for the Greek origin?
Note: Congratulations to Stephen Goranson for his remarkable antedating of “I’ll be jiggered.”
The joy of flogging a dead horse. Image by Estelle de Barescut viaWikimedia Commons. Public domain.
Spelling
I am not sure that flogging a dead horse is an occupation worthy of anyone’s efforts. As I said in my first post on Spelling Reform, the same arguments against the Reform have been recycled dozens of times. The loftiest of them sounds approximately like this: “It is wrong to wipe out the past.” Why is it wrong to wipe out an ugly past? English spelling is the product of endless meddling, and I will continue saying that the most ardent friends of tradition have never studied the history of English. Nor do they know that without any reforms English spelling has changed quite noticeably not only since the days of Shakespeare (have a look at the folios) but even since the eighteenth century. If you think that spelling choir and pronouncing quire is fine, more power to your elbow. (I am aware of the other spelling of this word.) Finally, I suspect that the most ardent opponents of the Reform have never taught school or college and have not corrected the indelible o(c)curance for occurrence and its likes.
It is certainly true that initially ANY reform increases confusion and invites resistance. Should we change our clocks twice a year? Unanimity is out of the question. Should we dispense with the redundant letter q? Does the spelling acquire make any sense? Isn’t akwire better? Isn’t thru better than through and trof better than trough? A tough question! Only one argument against the Reform makes sense. Any change disrupts the status quo, and we are already confused more than enough. Quite true. But to repeat: shouldn’t we sacrifice a few hours of unrest for the sake of the millions of people, young and yet unborn, who will benefit from our efforts?
One commentator pointed out that the French reform, to which I referred in passing, was minimal. Quite right! It is just the events in Iceland and France that convinced me that small changes may find acceptance, even despite some grumbling. The Reform in Germany (not radical but rather serious) met with fierce resistance but was enacted. The Germans survived. If today’s English spelling ever happens to be reformed, the reformers should step gingerly.
Webster, we are told, did more harm than good by producing two norms: one for the US and one for the UK. All Webster’s changes were endorsed by people like Skeat, and one can only pity the proverbial British clinging to tradition that retained honour, colour, and all that nonsense. But for the tragic history of the twentieth century, Spelling Reform (or some parts of it) may have been implemented long ago. (And may I add that British and American English are also different as regards pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary? This fact is never looked upon as tragically disruptive. Our common language indeed!)
Featured image: Photo by Ingolf viaFlickr. CC BY-SA 2.0.
As a general rule, native English nouns, adjectives, and verbs are not supposed to begin with j. And indeed, many of them are loans: consider joy, jealous, join, and their likes. However, sometimes the initial letter of words, borrowed from French or Latin, happens to be g (as in gentle, genealogy, germane, and others). A few g-words are confusing. Benighted foreigners never know how to pronounce the likes of –gin and also wonder why gilt is a homophone of guilt and why the second syllable of begin and the liquor gin are pronounced differently if they are spelled alike. Those who have read my last week’s post on reforming English spelling will remember what I am talking about.
The unforgettable Mr. Jingle. Image viaWikimedia Commons. Public domain.
As far as etymology is concerned, we often know that a word is of Romance origin, but its early history is obscure or even beyond reconstruction. Jag, jog, jug, jeer, jump, and most probably, jig are native, and yet they are etymological nightmares. One also runs into juggins (slang) “simpleton,” about whose history nothing is known. Onomatopoeic? Probably. And remember Mr. Pickwick’s foil, the unforgettable Mr. Alfred Jingle, with his bizarre speech habits. He did not bear his name for nothing.
The regular readers of this blog must be sick and tired of my never-ending references to emotional, sound symbolic, and sound-imitative words. But if they have a better explanation of the origin of jig ~ jag ~ jog, I’ll be grateful for a tip. Some such words, jazz and jowl, among them, have been discussed many times, with slender success, as nineteenth-century British authors liked to say. Even the etymology of jaw is obscure (see the post “Cheek by Jowl” from August 21, 2022).
My database contains a small selection of notes, published in 1894-1895, on the phrase I’m ~ I’ll be jiggered. (I am jiggered up “I am done” is also known.) I’ll be jiggered surfaced in an 1837 book but acquired popularity after it occurred in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861). In Dickens’s days, even boys were warned against profuse swearing. Those who did not dare utter the unpronounceable “I am buggered” used jiggered, a permitted substitute. And the timidest among them said sugared. (Today, regardless of your age, you can enjoy the fourth edition of Jesse Sheidlower’s book The F-Word: a marvelous collection of examples. Read and learn. The publisher is OUP.)
Some people derived jigger from snigger “to giggle,” which is a synonym of snicker. (Incidentally, snigger and niggardly are NOT offensive words, but you never know who is listening, so use both carefully.) Snigger, which has nothing to do with jigger, is a variant of snicker. Both verbs are sound-imitative. In Admiral Smyth’s 1867 Sailor’s Word-Book (wonderful reading!), jiggered up is cited as meaning “used up, exhausted” (slang; here jigger is the name of a small tackle or a wooden bandsaw, a homonym of jigger “to snicker”). A word like jig or jigger will mean what you want it to mean, very much in the spirit of Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland. In England, a hundred and fifty years ago, jigging it also meant “playing the truant,” and Old French giguer meant “to romp around, play wanton tricks,” a homonym, rather than the source, of English jig.
When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less. Image by John Tenniel viaWikimedia Commons. Public domain.
To add even more confusion to this story, I should add that also a jigger flea exists. The creature is sometimes known as “chico,” but jigger perhaps does more credit to the pest’s alacrity. Russian chik-chik means “clip-clip, snip-snip.” Obviously, jig–jig and chik-chik imitate a quick movement equally well, but jig is more expressive, because it begins with a voiced sound.
Spelling Reform Again
I’ll now return to my already mentioned previous post on Spelling Reform, because it called forth several responses. In addition to the comments, published a week ago, I received a friendly letter asking me who needs the Reform, given our spellchecks and AI, now that technology has made thinking almost redundant. I should also refer to my post of July 6, 2022, which called forth several friendly comments.
Let me make it clear: those who have mastered English spelling do not need the Reform: itcan benefit only the youngest among us and future generations. Indeed, spellchecks and AI are wonderful, but they exist for those who can already write English and know, for example, that write begins with w and is different from rite, right, and wright.
The first responders to my recent post mounted such a high horse that I feel overawed. Allegedly, I speak tongue in cheek. No, I made my suggestions in dead earnest. Another scornful question was: “What has the Spelling Society learned in 150 years of its existence?” It has learned a good deal. First, that the literate public will always oppose the Reform. Second, that such a reform is possible, as the history of countries from Russia to Spain and from Germany to Iceland has shown. Third, that though the most stubborn opponents of the Reform have no idea of what they are talking about, their obduracy has successfully killed the change that might benefit us all. Finally, that reforming irrational English spelling in one fell swoop is a utopian project, but the idea of moving at a snail’s pace may have potential.
One of the most often repeated and least convincing arguments against the Reform is that it will sever etymological ties between and among words. What ties? Latin had honor, Old French had (h)onor and (h)onur, Middle English had both honor and honour. What was lost when Webster changed honour to honor? Honor without its initial h will look odd to us. Let it stay for a while, though the Italians don’t mind onore!
The letter h has etymological justification in exhale, exhaust, exhibit, exhilarate, exhort, and exhume. But how many speakers of Modern English know anything about –haust, –hibit, and the rest? And how many of them recognize even the tie between exhilarate and hilarious? Incidentally, h in those words even does some harm, because it suggests the pronunciation ks, rather than gz, after e. In any case, isn’t it more reasonable to teach Latin by offering courses in Latin than through English spelling? And I dare ask: What do today’s learners and most of their English teachers know about etymology? Ladies and gentlemen, what century is it outside?
Every single objection to the Reform was known and refuted a hundred and fifty years ago. Our opponents have no idea of this history, have never read even Skeat (to mention the most famous name: see the end of this essay) and can only say contemptuously: “A bad idea. Nonsense.” What about some informed and honest polemic?
Proceedings of the British Academy, 1905-1905. Image via the author.
I agree with the remark that the more common a usage, the harder it is to change it. Hence the idea of first making such changes as may or even should not irritate anyone. The problem is to persuade the public that their children and millions of children all over the world, including those still unborn, will benefit from at least some simplification of our irrational, maddeningly hard spelling, which is not worthy of learning. The main thing is to find influential supporters. It is not the money that we are talking about. Believe me: an old fighter for the Reform, I am jiggered.
And here is a passage from Skeat’s 1906 speech: “I remember very well… meeting with a passage in the works of so popular an author as Bulwer Lytton… in which modern English spelling is frankly declared to have been the invention of the devil; because it is unlikely that any other being could have hit upon a system which, to all appearances, is so chaotic, so inconsistent, and so contradictory in many instances to common sense.”
Like Mr. Micauwber, I have thrown the gauntlet to the bedeviled society. Will anyone pick it up?
The English Spelling Society was founded in 1908. This was a good time for the reformers. Great people, like G. B. Shaw and Walter W. Skeat, among quite a few others, supported the movement and hoped that it would be possible to make English spelling look more humane. But time worked against the reformers. The World War, the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, and the triumph of the Nazis in Germany, followed by another, even more devastating war, pushed many worthy projects into the background.
An almost invisible inconvenience. Photo by Jesse Rorabaugh via Wikimedia Commons. CC0 1.0 (public domain).
Among the chaos of the twentieth century, the ills of the irrational English spelling began to look like almost invisible inconveniences. Still later, computers came into being, spellcheckers were invented, and then AI speedily outsmarted the best of us. Against that background, the Reform lost appeal even to the few remaining enthusiasts. But the Society did not die. Nor did the problems, once addressed by people like Shaw, Skeat, and their allies go away.
Now, perhaps more than at any time in the past, English spelling cries to be reformed, because most of the world uses English as a vital means of communication, and people from east to west learn to read and write English. EVERYBODY will gain if we dispense with c in acquire, the second m in communal, and the second f in sufficient. I have of course cited only a few egregious examples, to illustrate my thesis.
Last week, the Spelling Society, of which I am President (an honorary post; all the work is done in the UK), convened a congress in London, and it would be wrong to say that the mood was invariably upbeat. The Devil’s Advocate even suggested that the Society should be disbanded, because no progress had been achieved since 1908, and it is unclear whether the future looks rosier than the past. Yet I am pleased to report that the Society will continue its activities and address not only spelling but also literacy in the broadest sense of the term. This, I believe, was a good decision.
Writing is inseparable from reading in the time-honored concert of three R’s. Paradoxically, though today more people are literate than ever, fewer read books. The young live in a digitalized cloud, glued to their mobile phones. Though some teachers are horrified, as always, the larger world has more pressing business to attend to. Yet its indifference to spelling is not the only obstacle in the way of the Reform. There is no unanimity among the members of the Society in what direction and how far theReform should go. And here I will risk offering a few suggestions. As I understand, quite a few members of the Society share my views, and some of them have put forth similar proposals before.
To repeat: those who have mastered the intricacies of English spelling tend to resist the idea of a sweeping change and possibly of any change. Literate people have spent years learning the spelling of leaden and its likes and will be reluctant to admit that if the adjective acquires the form leden, their troubles were not worth the effort. In my opinion, our only hope to make progress is to adopt a minimalist program, trying to reach the desired goal by alienating no one and taking one small step after another over possibly several decades.
This is where I think we should begin. Get rid of the letters whose absence few will regret: co(m)munity, mis(c)e(l)lany, ca(n)nibal, co(r)ruscate, su(f)ficient, and their likes. If image bothers no one, scrimage with one m may also be acceptable to everybody. (Note my careful emphasis on everybody!) It is also reasonable to leave alone horrors like the borrowed words conscientious, colonel, and fuchsia, along with the native monsters through, laugh, eerie, and their ilk. Their time will come.
This is fuchsia. The word fuchsia cannot be respelled, because it commemorates the Renaissance botanist Leonard Fuchs (1501-1566). Left: Photo by Dominicus Johannes Bergsma via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0. Right: Image by Heinrich Füllmaurer via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.Images combined.
Here are a few more stray examples of the losses no one should rue: dumb, numb, thumb, succumb. Climb is more controversial, because clim is out of the question, and clime will collide with its homonym. (Who expects consistency in the erratic world of English spelling!) One more important case. I am convinced that wherever possible, we should suggest regularizing g before the i ~ e and introduce j in the likes of gibberish. Changegin (liquor) to jin and enjoy the beauty of James Joyce’s phrase jejune Jesuit.
Open the bottle and let the jinnie out! Photo by ismaellabrador via Pixabay. Public domain.
I am not ready to lay out an extensive list of words in need of respelling. At this stage, our modest goal is, as I believe, to change at least something without offending anyone. Not only dyed in the wool conservatives will be up in arms if we suggest respelling come, gone, eight, sure, and sugar. However, most will perhaps tolerate occupy with one c and succumb also with one c and without b. Let us appease the conservatives. The next step will (I hope) turn scullion and scrub into skullion and skrub and introduce other relatively non-traumatic changes, but this is not the time to envision a distant future. Let me repeat: the problem is how to talk the world into starting the reform. If some members vote against any version of the minimalist program, we may go ahead without their consent.
Help to the Society won’t come from high legislative bodies. MP’s, congressmen, and senators are too busy to notice us. Who then is interested? Teachers, including teachers of special education. This means that their organizations may join our fight for the Reform. It makes sense to explain to them that we are their close allies and that we need a campaign from them in support of our efforts, rather than their money. Foreigners from all over the world. The groups to contact are the people who teach English as a second language and perhaps a few friendly embassies.
Media. Couldn’t we talk to the editors of magazines like Playboy, Newsweek, VanityFair, and so forth into joining our push for the Reform? They might place pictures of an unhappy child, trying to spell occurrence or wondering why quiz is not kwiz? (By the way, some European languages have abolished the letter q.) Our “influencers” and idols (rappers, comedians, producers, and eccentric billionaires) might perhaps be talked into helping an organization (I mean us, our Spelling Society) that does not need their funds but would be grateful for publicizing a worthy effort. Fun conquers the world. Vulgar? Not a bit. Just common sense. The English-speaking world has no official bodies to regulate spelling. We may achieve progress only with the help of popular culture.
Spelling reforms, drastic or moderate, overcame the resistance of opponents in Russia, Germany, France, and most recently, in Spain. Useful updates have been made in all the Scandinavian countries, including Iceland. Noah Webster modified American English spelling. We, English spelling reformers, should move slowly and probably stop discussing grand and grandiose projects. Nor is consistency our goal. Full and fill are spelt with two l’s, but fulfil wisely ignores this circumstance! English spelling will never achieve the finish and finesse of Finnish. Let us achieve what we can.
In the header you will see an image of G. B. Shaw’s play Androcles and the Lion. Search the Internet to find out what this image has to do with today’s story.
Featured image: Androcles and the Lion, staged at Indiana University, from “Arbutus” (1921). Public domain viaWikimedia Commons.
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