Spelling Reformers Picket Bee, Say 'Enuf is Enuf'

May 30, 2007 — -- If it's true that no event has really arrived until sign-wielding protestors set up shop outside it, than the Scripps National Spelling Bee is officially a big deal. Today spelling-reform-movement protesters pushed pavement alongside the premier spell-down.

These spelling-reform activists have joined forces with the American Literacy Council and the London-based Simplified Spelling Society. They claim writers like Chaucer and Mark Twain, thinkers like Charles Darwin and Andrew Carnegie, and Nobel laureates among their ranks. And, put plainly, they encourage the use of simpler spelling through the elimination of the rogue vowels and consonants they say clutter the English language.

Under their edict, "through" becomes "thru," "have" becomes "hav," "you" becomes "u."

"There are 4,000 common words you can't spell from the established rules," said Masha Bell, an English writer who traveled from across the pond to join the spelling-reform picket line outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington, where the final rounds of the National Spelling Bee are taking place. She said her group's charge is to "make English spelling more consistent."

Toting a sign that read "Let's End the I in Friend," she explained the history of the spelling-reform cause. The silver-haired Bell traced inconsistencies in the English language back to the 15th century and William Tyndale, the first printer to translate the Bible into English.

Bell said that incorrect spellings and use of language in Tyndale's translation were taken as fact. People thought "it was in the Bible, so it was right."

When asked how, in a time of infinite communication options, how a group goes about changing a language, Bell was quick to underscore that the group's aims are to "change the spelling, not the language."

Dennis Baron, professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, described the history of the spelling-reform movement as "long, distinguished and totally ineffective."