Admirable people, namely Solnushka and Aphra, have been discussing spelling. And so, of course, I thought ‘Mmmmm, spelling…’ and went into a somewhat fugue state, as spelling is something I very nearly (and somewhat inadvertantly) created a hideously under-paid career in for myself. Which could be a reason why it’s taken me so long to formulate anything coherent to say on the matter. [Coherent? - Ed]
I have an idiosyncratic take on spelling. And grammar. But mostly spelling. You see, I was taught to read long before I was taught the alphabet. And I was not taught the English alphabet, or spelling or grammar, at all. I, err, hoovered them up from books. Which I read. Relentlessly. Choice reading at the age of eight, The Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology and the Time Life Nature Library. I knew how to spell ‘electromagnetic radiation’ before I could reliably pronounce ‘rabbit’. [Or 'steak' (steek). Or 'helicopter' (hekilopter). Get her tipsy, it recrudesces].
(Look, ’steek’ is a perfectly logical pronounciation for something written ’steak’. [...] Very well then, a somewhat logical pronounciation. And I was a child [You were twelve before you gave over]. A child, I repeat, who had had very little exposure to spoken English. So naff off).
Where was I going with this?
Oh yes. Titania commented thusly on Solnushka’s post:
What I’ve learnt is to recognise words that LOOK wrong. My eyes are expecting a word to have a specific ’silhouette’ and if it doesn’t fit, it’s not spelt correctly.
Now this is exactly how I read. To the extent that if someone askes me how to spell a word, I have to mentally go off, find a black-board, find the chalk, write the word out in full on said black-board, and then read it back to the enquirer, who by this point has wandered off to ask someone less weird. But because I see a shape, and the shape has to be the right shape to mean a certain word, I see spelling mistakes instantly and very clearly. I can’t even take a stab at what the writer meant without slowing down to check each letter in sequence and mentally compare it with every entry in my onboard dictionary, which doesn’t take quite as long as all that, but can make me lose the thread, which makes me irritable, which no one wants, ho yus.
I received two completely contradictory introductions to Official English Spelling. At a primary school somewhere in the wilds of Hampberksurrshire, I was firmly dragged up to meet the alphabet, the assumption being as I could read I clearly knew it, and made to sound letters out as I read. Of course, under this proceeding, as I had no idea what sound went with which letter, I came across as illiterate. Also, bored out of tiny mind. My day of liberation came when the delightful Miss Sweetheart twigged that I really could really read, and phonetics was messing with my head; whereapon she awarded me the freedom of the story-book shelves and left me cheerfully alone. On the other hand, a few years later I ended up at a school for the children of English-speaking ex-pats in Italy, where we were taught mostly on the American plan, and wherein the Spelling Bee held sway as the One and Only True Test. Did I mention I could spell? In written tests I inevitably got 100%. In spoken tests I also got 100% as long as I was allowed the short pause in which to wrestle the black-board and chalk into my fore-brain. On the basis of this alone, they put me, aged ten, in a class of twelve-year-olds.
Reading age of fifteen, me. Emotional age of, oh, seven.
[We are not here to unpack the tragic scraps of your childhood. Are we?]
Basically, I learnt two lessons. One, spelling is a valuable trick that will get you quite a lot of attention, and that a few select people will assume you are clever. Two, everyone else will think you are a dork.
Other people, my age and younger, seem to have been taught to read by being denied the candy and fun-parts for as long as possible, while being presented with an indigestible mass of meaningless tasks to drag themselves through with no real intimation of the reward in store. At six, I was wallowing in books and filling my mind with delightful nonsense about hobbits and rabbits and brave little apple-cheeked kiddies saving people from wheel-chairs/ depression/ ravines. At six, my peers were laboriously finding out that muh-oh-ter-her-eh-ruh spelt ‘mother’. Not even that M,O,T,H,E,R spelt mother, or that mother, once dug out of the mass of nonsense syllables, was doing anything worth the effort of decoding. Later, when I was falling headlong into Narnia and Earthsea and Middle Earth and Mythical Ireland, my peers, the motivated ones (the rest being far too busy shouting in an outdoorsy way), were wrestling with one slow chapter at a time, with something they were utterly unable to forget was a book, an artefact they had to laboriously decode in order to extract a story. If they got enough good stories, they’d persist until the reading came smoothly. But even now we’re all thirty-odd, I know many who set themselves down to reading with gritted teeth, and who have to stop for a rest after half-an-hour. And they have degrees, poor lambs. How much struggle did that take, while I simply opened my eyes and hoovered the stuff up like tea?
No wonder no one can spell in English. It’s boring, it’s hard, memorising long meaningless strings of sequences is not a rewarding or jolly task, and the human brain really doesn’t see why it should retain stupid dullard nonsense like that when it could be remembering how to drive, or how to bake cake, or play poker, or the complete Lyrical Ballads.
