O NE OF the many infuriating things about a computer crash is the loss of the custom dictionary in the word processor.
Of course, one should always assume the computer will crash with loss of all data any day and be religious about doing back-ups of everything. Alas, I am not especially religious. Nearly everything has been saved, but not that custom dictionary. It means adding to the dictionary hundreds of unusual proper nouns, like Warrnambool with two Rs and Waramanga with one, so they do not appear as mistakes, and when you do make a mistake like Warnambool you know it actually is one and must be corrected. I could decide not to worry about adding such words to the dictionary, but then you have to check every subsequent time you use them, as the ravages of age befuddle the brain. Anyway, the proper nouns are not so bad. Worse, is the fact that many British spellings are thrown up as spelling errors. Again, they have to be added to the dictionary.
Again, so a real mistake is recorded as error such as sucour and does not squeak through uncorrected as just another British spelling being denounced by Microsoft’s spell-checker. It is perhaps fortuitous that the crash came in the same week as I have been marking some student assignments and the same week as the retirement (for the second time this time at age 80 after working nearly 20 years part-time) of a former chief sub-editor of The Canberra Times, Michael Travis. He was a stickler for not only getting spelling right, but in sound English usage in general. He would applaud the use of ”fortuitous” in the previous paragraph because I meant accidental and undesigned, not fortunate.
The combination of events got me thinking about which language battles are lost or not worth fighting over, so that we may concentrate instead on the war. The battles are often fought over word use and meanings which change over time. ”Host” and ”contact” are now acceptable as verbs. Battle lost, no damage done. ”Progress” is being used as a verb, especially by those high in the United States military and US
industry. They want to ”progress” something as they ”move forward”. It is ugly, but will probably become accepted, though I will never use it. ”Fortuitous”, ”beg the question”, ”refute” and ”fulsome” have all pretty well had it. ”Beg the question” is no longer a logical flaw in which a premise assumes the truth of the conclusion which depends on it. ”Refute” no longer means to disprove, but merely reject. Indeed, one sub-editor once used the authority of the Macquarie Dictionary to posit this meaning to Travis.
Travis replied, ”Well, the bloody dictionary is wrong.” ”Fulsome” no longer means cloying insincerity, but full, especially when applied to praise. The trouble is if you use these words in their original or ”true” meaning, only a very few people will understand you. When you reach that state, you know the battle for that word is lost. Does it matter? Well, I think the war is more important than most of the battles. The war is over clarity of meaning. That requires clear thinking and a desire to tell the truth. Much poor writing and poor speaking comes because the author cannot think clearly, or can think clearly but wants to hide something or gloss over an ugly truth. The former is unfortunate, but understandable, even excusable. The latter so often found in the fields of politics and war is not. Incidentally, speaking of war and language, lawyer and author Geoffrey Robertson, referring to the war on terror said this week, ”How can you have a war on a noun?” and for an answer he quoted someone as saying sadly that the first casualty of war is grammar. In the language war, many Brits, Australians, New Zealanders and users of English in Africa are clinging to British spellings.
But I notice that many among the young, particularly my students, are using American spellings. Well, in this computer age of built- in spell-checkers, that battle is bound to be lost before long. I think we should not only accept it, but embrace it. It will be one less thing to ”correct”. One less thing to ”get wrong”. My students have enough trouble with punctuation and homophones to have unnecessary spelling confusion thrown in. Indeed, when I mentioned homophones I got such puzzled looks that I thought some of them might reach for the booklet on the university’s sexual-equality policy. In any event, many of the American spellings have older and better provenance than the British
versions. The -or ending in neighbor, favor, and honor, for example. Many make more sense when you consider pronunciation. The -er ending in center, meter and theater and the -og rather than -ogue endings in catalog, dialog and analog are examples. The American -ed ending for past participles and past tense is more consistent with other verbs than the British -t ending in dreamt and learnt, though on that count the British ”strived” has more merit than the American ”strove”. There seems to be no logic or consistency with double letters. The Americans have one L in jewelery and two in enrollment the British the other way. Can’t someone organise a trans-Atlantic conference on uniformity of spelling? Small wonder Bernard Shaw talked about the British and Americans being ”one people separated by a common language”. And I do not mind -ize endings if they are going to save me from redoing my custom dictionary and give my students an easier time. In any event, the different spellings do not affect the spoken word. Nor do they affect meaning, and that’s where the language war is really worth fighting.