Manchester Memoirs, Vol. Ixv. (1921), No. 6 3 



does not give a correct indication of the origin of the 

 word (even if it were desirable to preserve this feature in our 

 spelling) ; and secondly, because they offend against the true 

 ideal of English spelling as striven after by the great writers 

 of the past. 



If anyone suspects me of an unwarranted attack upon the 

 sacredness of English spelling I would advise him to read 

 the preface to Dr. Johnson's Dictionary written in 1755. Dr. 

 Johnson there admits that there was really no authoritative 

 way of writing many of the words, and that the greatest 

 diversity of spelling existed among educated people. There 

 had been several dictionaries before Johnson's, notably Caw- 

 drey's "Table Alphabetical of Hard Words," 1604, and 

 Bailey's " Etymological English Dictionary," 1721 ; but 

 people in those days had not acquired the habit of looking 

 upon the dictionary as an authority. The great mass of 

 Johnson's Dictionary and its apparent show of scholarship 

 gave people a respect for it that it really never deserved or 

 even claimed. If Dr. Johnson had been a man of wider vision, 

 he would have realised that the essential principle of true 

 English spelling is conformity to sound; and in choos- 

 ing between the dozens of alternative spellings which were 

 open to him at that time he would have chosen the spelling 

 that most nearly represented the pronunciation most generally 

 accepted as correct. Had he done that, he would have been 

 on firm ground and would have done a great and useful piece of 

 work ; but he chose rather the position of the pedant who likes 

 to air his knowledge or supposed knowledge of the origin of 

 words, and, as a consequence, he perpetuated a large number 

 of fanciful and altogether erroneous spellings that had sprung 

 up in a very fanciful period of English Literature. The one 

 redeeming feature of his book is the Preface, in which he 

 admits that his judgment may have been wrong. It was 

 wrong, but people did not read the preface. The schools set 

 up the book as an authority. The learned man, in their eyes, 

 was the man who knew how Dr. Johnson spelt a word. The 

 ignorant man was he who did not know that very tricky and 

 elusive spelling. So the authority of the fetish grew, until in 

 our time we may say that there is a curtain hung up which 

 hides from us the historv of the spelling of our words. On 

 that curtain are inscribed in black letters hundreds of words 

 exhibiting the most absurd inconsistencies and want of 

 scholarship, and we are told that that is how we must spell the 

 words, or be relegated in disgrace to the class "uneducated." 



I propose to draw aside the curtain that we mav have a 



