Orthography: Straighten up and spell right

In which a reader is visited by the grammar police

Photo by Mark Rasmuson on Unsplash

Reader Tony Brenton-Rule tells me he received a telling-off from the grammar police the other day for describing a section of forest trail as impassible, thanks to heavy rain. The word he was after, chided the officer despatched to restore order, was impassable.

First things first: there is a word impassible, but it’s not the one Tony was after. Spelt with an i, it means incapable of experiencing pain, a quality believed to be possessed only by God, David Goggins and Richie McCaw.

Tony may be interested to know that the officer he encountered was from the Spelling Division of the Orthographic Squad, whose business encompasses spelling (mostly) but also such fine points as word spaces, punctuation, capitalisation, hyphenation, and emphasis.

Other squads busy themselves with matters such as malapropisms, idioms and observing good Latin constructions, despite English being a Germanic language (hence the pseudo-rule that says don’t split an infinitive), subject-verb agreement and misuse of tenses.

Orthography is a mid-15c addition to English. Originally most likely to be spelt ortographie or ortografie, it’s taken from Old French ortografie, which got it from Latin orthographia, which took it, as everything about the word suggests, from Greek orthographia (orthos, “correct” and graphein “to write”). By the 16th century, both the English and the French had decided those classical civilisations knew a thing or two about spelling, and re-inserted the h after ort, and ditched the f at the end in favour of the original ph.

To those who think that English writers played fast and loose with their spelling until after Shakespeare’s time, the timing of orthography’s arrival suggests that may be drawing a long bow. In fact, it’s probably no coincidence that it appeared about the same time as the printing press.

You can also forgive variations in spelling during the Middle Ages. After the Norman invasion, English experienced what every conquered language does - a long period of neglect and abuse from those in power. With no high-placed friends to look after its wellbeing, its fortunes were left to the scattered masses, who not only spoke wildly varying dialects, but also - with few exceptions - neither read nor wrote.

According to Oxford English, written English didn’t really re-emerge until the late 1300s. When the Court of Chancery switched from Latin and French to English around 1430, it imposed some standards on written language, which was called, unsurprisingly, Chancery English. It was the start of what you and I might think of as modern spelling.

The Court of Chancery in the early 19th century, sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Old Hall. Unknown source, Public Domain.

The arrival of the printing press in 1476 added impetus to a process that was already under way. But it wasn’t plain sailing to start with. Many of the early printing press operators were Belgians who didn’t speak, read or write English. At first, the printed word was appearing everywhere, in wildly varying spellings produced by people who, quite literally, didn’t know their arse from their elbow.

Orthography shares a prefix with over a hundred other words, many of them specialist medical or chemical terms. Ones we’ll all be familiar with include orthodontics, orthopaedics and orthodox - all to do with having one, or parts of one, line up correctly (often generously lining the pocket of the specialist doing the lining up). In photography, orthochromatic refers to the accurate reproduction of a subject’s colours. An orthophosphate is - and I quote - a salt of orthophosphoric acid containing the trivalent, negative radical PO4. What that has to do with being straight, accurate or correct, I have no idea, and my admittedly skimpy research into the subject has yielded no clues. (I can report, though, that chemistry-based websites, while fascinated by what chemicals do when you mix them together, are disappointingly uninterested in the etymology of the weird words they use.)

Here’s another finding I stumbled upon: according to Science Direct, phosphoric acid, which is commonly used as a food additive, is an irritant and corrosive but generally considered to be nontoxic.

Well, that’s alright then.

Despite centuries of being told how to spell words, English writers remain determined to die on a small handful of defiant hills. No one has yet been able to impose a single agreed spelling on ok (or okay or OK). Is an e required in judgement? You choose. And it’s uncertain to this day whether you should run amok or amuck in your favourite tee-shirt or T-shirt if the donut or doughnut that you just paid good money for gives you the hiccups or hiccoughs.

Bill Bryson, in his wonderful book Made in America, states that in 1972 a scholar named Lee C. Deighton compared the spellings of every word in four leading American dictionaries. He found 1770 common words upon which the dictionaries couldn’t agree on a preferred spelling. I don’t know whether I’m more in awe of the number of words or the effort Deighton must have expended, but I think it’s the effort.

Experience tells us that efforts to bring about global spelling conformity are equally doomed. American English broke ranks with British English around the time of Noah Webster, chopping pesky vowels out of words like favour and anaemia, rearranging the final letters in words like centre and theatre, and doing away with the orthographic distinction between cheque and check. While Webster himself often gets the credit for these changes, he was mostly recording what had already become common practice in his part of the world.

As for Tony, while I would never suggest he ignores spelling conventions (and conventions is all they are - not commandments from God), he can at least take comfort in knowing that the -able and -ible suffixes have the same origin in Latin. Which one got used by the Romans (-abilis or -ibilis depended on the inflectional vowel of the verb (similar to teach vs taught in English). Of course with Latin no longer being a living language, that distinction is all but redundant, but it lives on in there being a whole suite of words ending in -ible (submersible, risible, divisible, etc) and another set ending in -able (capable, probable, preventable, etc). Mostly the twain do what twains do, and never meet, but now and again you’ll find a word where the suffix is up for grabs. While collectible, for example, is the more common spelling, collectable is also accepted by major dictionaries.

If the grammar police haul Tony before the court (not to be confused with the caught), I’m confident he’ll get off with a warning. His offence is both minor and understandable, and if I know the man, he’ll take care not to repeat his behaviour.

I certainly hope so, anyway. The police already have enough on their hands, don’t they, dealing with the real criminals who don’t care about hyphens.

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Bits and specious

It’s Māori Language Week in New Zealand, and a fine thing that is, too. The theme this year: “Ake Ake Ake - a forever language.” Check out reomāori.co.nz for more.

Did you know that the saying a stiff upper lip is an American invention? It appeared as early as 1815 in Massachusetts, whereas its first appearance in Britain isn’t until 1844. Before that, one assumes the best the British could manage was a pliable upper lip, which of course will never do.

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Quote of the week

Every time I’m wrong, the world makes a little less sense.
Frasier Crane