{"id":100916,"date":"2017-08-07T07:55:23","date_gmt":"2017-08-07T14:55:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=100916"},"modified":"2017-08-07T07:55:23","modified_gmt":"2017-08-07T14:55:23","slug":"gospell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2017\/08\/gospell.html","title":{"rendered":"Gospell…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u2026in which Yr Obdt Svt contemplates the mysteries of English orthography before an audience of Australians who spell things all weird and wrong and who think I spell things weird and wrong:<\/p>\n

Some comedian once remarked that when he was a child, television led him to believe that quicksand was going to be a much bigger issue than adulthood revealed it to be.<\/p>\n

Spelling is a bit like that. It is one of the first great obstacles we meet as children when we hit elementary education. First, you learn the alphabet and after mastering the awesome power to just draw letters correctly with your #2 pencil you then began the baffling task of learning how to spell the colossal range of words in the English language. You learn \u201crules\u201d which, unlike actual rules, mean nothing to somebody who actually is trying to learn English. \u201cRules\u201d like \u201cea\u201d is pronounced with a long E sound as in \u201cmeat\u201d, except for when it pronounced with a short E sound as in \u201csweat\u201d or long A sound as in \u201cgreat\u201d. And \u201cae\u201d is pronounced with a long E sound as in \u201cCaesar\u201d except when you are talking about Caesar\u2019s praetor, which has a long A sound.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s just scratching the surface. If you brought enough through your spelling class, you learned that \u201cough\u201d could sound like aw, uff, and oo\u2014and that this made no sense but was Just the Way Things Are So Shut Up. You learned that \u201cdebt\u201d had a b in it for no reason other than that somebody thought it made the word look cool and Latiny sometime back when people cared about things being Latiny. You learned that other letters were there for the same reason your appendix is still there: because it used to do something but now it doesn\u2019t but it still hangs around because it\u2019s too much trouble to get rid of it. So all that ink spilled (or spilt, you can spell it both ways) on billions of silent e\u2019s will just go on being spilled or spilt. Likewise, there will go on being mice, but not hice; oxen, but not moosen; many sheep, but not many goat; cow and cattle, but not sow and sattle.<\/p>\n

For some reason, my brain had an affinity for learning spelling when I was a child. I can\u2019t explain it because while I was learning it, I had the brain of a child and therefore had no capacity for meta-analysis of why spelling was so easy for me to pick up. I just kept my head down and learned it. Certain rules helped (\u201cI before E, except after C, or when sounding like A as in \u2018neighbor\u2019 and \u2018weigh\u2019\u201d). But mostly I just internalized the cardinal rule that spelling \u201crules\u201d were, as Captain Barbossa says in\u00a0Pirates of the Caribbean<\/em>, not so much a code as a guideline.<\/p>\n

Spelling is one of those things we are supposed to transcend. You are to learn it so well that the day comes when you don\u2019t think about it anymore, like getting potty trained. The goal is something else: being able to communicate. Being able to write, not in the sense of \u201chaving the ability to grip a pencil and form the word \u2018dog\u2019\u201d, but being able to write in order to, say, pen a letter to your sweetie, or communicate with stockholders on the year-end profits of the National Widget Company of Australia, or pen, \u201cIf this be error and upon me prov\u2019d\/I never writ, nor no man ever lov\u2019d.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There\u2019s more here<\/a>\u2026<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2026in which Yr Obdt Svt contemplates the mysteries of English orthography before an audience of Australians who spell things all weird and wrong and who think I spell things weird and wrong: Some comedian once remarked that when he was a child, television led him to believe that quicksand was going to be a much […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[836],"class_list":["post-100916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-catholic-weekly-stuff"],"yoast_head":"\nGospell...<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"...in which Yr Obdt Svt contemplates the mysteries of English orthography before an audience of Australians who spell things all weird and wrong and who\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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