Decades ago, the experiments and case histories written about his patients by Oliver Sacks, the late English-born neurologist, sparked my interest in how brains work and the strange things they can get up to when something is off-kilter at birth or goes wrong later in life. Many of those things—like anterograde amnesia in which no long-term memories can be formed, and agnosia in which a person cannot recognize people, objects, smells, sounds, or shapes—can be severely debilitating. Hence the title of Sacks’ 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. For others, such as people with prosopagnosia—impairment of the ability to recognize faces—workarounds can overcome at least some of the impacts once the afflicted person realizes that other people don’t perceive faces the same way.
Until a few years ago, I hadn’t really connected anything Sacks describes in such fascinating detail with something that has gone on inside my brain ever since I could read. Probably because it’s a helpful peculiarity with no obvious negative aspects. This is my ability to spell any word written in the Roman alphabet once I have seen it, heard it pronounced, and learned its meaning, regardless of what language it’s in. I never studied or otherwise sweated to develop this ability. I never honed it. It came with the equipment and has always just been there. A weird, narrow band of photographic memory.
Where brain function and life itself are concerned, embedded spelling ability is a rather teensy matter compared with people who perceive their spouses to be headgear, not to mention those living with the devastating effects of dementia from aging or strokes, the latter having killed nine female relatives in four generations of my family.
But as someone who for 30 years made his living from writing and editing, this ability I apparently came equipped with from the womb has served as a valuable tool. In that whole time and since I’ve never met anybody else, including editors I hired or otherwise worked with, who had the same “natural” ability, although many of them were excellent at spelling. It has zero to do with a higher level of intelligence. Some of the best writers I know are terrible spellers. What I’ve taken to wondering lately is whether this peculiarity, this defect that accords me supernatural spelling skills, also left a deficit in some other area that I’m unaware of. Given that I don’t know a single other person with this same ability, it’s probably safe to say it isn’t some evolutionarily beneficial mutation. I only wish that it had also given me the insight to see other, more important things half so clearly.
Working as an editor led me ages ago to study how spelling conventions came to be in English. Not so long ago, there was no standardization, as anyone who reads the original literature or documents from the 14th-19th centuries becomes acutely aware. It’s a mishmash where different spellings of the same word can be found on the same page. Mostly, spelling was a matter for the individual writer, and there were no editors. Moreover, while most languages have only five or six distinctive vowel sounds, English has 11 but only five letters to represent them, which leads to the infamous “cough,” “rough,” “through,” “though,” “thought,” “doubt” problem, among others. One of the reasons for this is that these words and so many others originated in the different languages that influenced the Germanic base of English, Old Norse, Greek, and Latin.
The first attempt at spelling reform was published in 1568, and many others followed. They were ignored in part because their proposals were too radical. For years, scholars who in those days studied Greek and Latin in the normal course of their education linked English words to their real (and frequently imagined) Graeco-Latin counterparts, and they spelled them by adding silent letters to heighten the actual or alleged connection.
In 1755, Samuel Johnson published his dictionary with its standardized spelling. But that didn’t solve the problem which spoke to Benjamin Franklin so loudly that he added to his roster of inventions a new alphabet in 1768, published as A Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling in 1779. Franklin’s “fonetic” alphabet consisted of 26 letters. However, he ditched c, j, q, w, x, and y and replaced them. Here’s his whole alphabet:
That radical standardization didn’t take hold, however, or the Declaration of Independence that Franklin had a major hand in editing would look a lot different, and so would everything else written in American English. Noah Webster picked up the torch and proposed some simplifications in 1806. Some were adopted, but most were ignored.
In 1876, the American Philological Reform Association (APRA) adopted 11 new spellings: ar for are, catalog for catalogue, definit for definite, gard for guard, giv for give, hav for have, infinit for infinite, liv for live, tho for though, thru for through, wisht for wished. In 1883, two competing philological societies came up with 24 spelling reforms. The National Education Association started the Simplified Spelling Board in 1906 and eventually recommended spelling reforms in some 300 words.
While some simplified or simply changed spelling reforms occurred gradually and haphazardly, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune in 1883 adopted the APRA path and began using its 11 recommendations on its pages. But in 1934, and lasting until 1975, the newspaper adopted spelling changes in 80 words under the headline TRIBUNE ADOPTS SANER SPELLING OF MANY WORDS. Some of those changes were indeed an improvement via simplification: canceled, catalog, tranquility. Some were odd but still made sense: tho, thru, plaintif. But some were too big a bridge for most readers to cross or even understand without a double take: lether, fantom, gally.
In one of my earliest newspaper jobs, the editor/publisher had ties to the Tribune and had adopted its stylebook, so any reporter or editor who worked there had to memorize those reformed spellings and incorporate them into stories. I’ve also at various times had to learn other stylebooks published by The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Rocky Mountain News, and the Associated Press. While none of these has adopted radical spelling changes, each has its own style, but when it comes to orthography, this is mostly not about spelling but rather a matter of capitalization and the use of accents and other diacriticals.
In a world infected by a lethal virus, the climate crisis, the spread and modernization of nuclear weapons, and autocrats everywhere in the ascendancy, getting everything spelled “right” is not exactly the world’s most pressing concern. If I spelled that “rite,” who would not get what I meant? But knowing how to do so without having had to exert the slightest bit of effort has definitely made one piece of my life a lot easier. All because of a tweak nature inserted somewhere in my brain.