RIVER CITY JOURNAL: WAIT TO SEE WHAT'S HAPPENED TO GOOD, OLD SPELLING

If you avoid writing big words like I do, you too have a spelling problem. Uv curs, zer's a solutin to ze problem. Red on.

I got my first newspaper job because I could spell. I don't say that to brag. What happened was this: A weekly newspaper needed a reporter. When I inquired about the job, the editor asked me to write a caption for a photo he intended to publish. I typed out the information. When the editor looked at what I wrote, he told me all the words were spelled correctly. I was hired.

Of course, I never told the editor that I carefully chose the words for the caption. I only used little words, the ones I was sure I knew how to spell. I have a well-worn dictionary to help me with the rest.

I didn't know until this week that Mark Twain had made spelling the subject of one of his short stories. I found this out by reading a column in Publishers' Auxiliary, a publication for newspaper folks, by Tom Mullen, publisher and editor of The News Letter Journal in Newcastle, Wyo.

As Tom tells the story, Twain didn't have much use for spelling. In his story, the noted author told of a woman who knew how to spell only 92 words correctly. Whenever she had to write correspondence of any kind, she would limit herself to those 92 words.

Not a bad plan.

When I was in school, I did pretty well on spelling tests by memorizing the list of words the teacher gave us. Being that I'm in the spelling business now, you would think I would remember how to spell the words I use most often to write a column. But I don't. I start questioning myself, and as soon as I do that, I know I have to use the dictionary.

Our younger son was never what you would call a great speller when he was in school. He used to write down telephone messages. It was like trying to decode a top-secret message, but if you sounded out every syllable, you could get the gist of his notes. One of us would read aloud, and the other would listen. Hearing the sounds was the key to breaking the code.

I used to hold up a friend of ours as a role model for our younger son. The friend was then the city manager in Maryville, Mo., where we were living at the time. He couldn't spell diddly. (I just looked up "diddly" in the dictionary, because I couldn't spell it either.) "Look at Ray," I'd say to our younger son. "He can't spell. But it doesn't matter as long as you grow up and get a job -- and a secretary." I don't know if that was much of an inspiration, but our younger son managed to get a college degree and now writes computer courseware for military pilots and aircraft mechanics. I've noticed that his e-mails rarely have any misspelled words.

You might say that today's computer-literate writers have an advantage, because computer spell checkers correct all your sloppy mistakes. English is too complicated a language for spell checkers. They don't come close.

I remember when I was going to Shady Nook School on Greenwood Valley in the Ozark hills west of here, spelling bees were a pretty big deal. Some teachers used bees to teach spelling. Others would only have spelling bees for special occasions. In any event, the spelling bees I remember were great equalizers. Every student in the one-room school -- all eight grades -- lined up against the chalkboard. The teacher would start out with easy words, so younger students did pretty well at first. It was great fun to see an eighth-grader stumble over one of the easy words and have to sit down. And sometimes a younger student -- a smart fourth-grader -- would win the spelling bee. For some folks, spelling is easy as pie.

In his column, Tom Mullen included another piece about spelling that I thought was so good I would share it with you.

(In the real world, this would be called plagiarism, but if journalists are thieves, there is honor among crooks. You see, by prominently mentioning Tom's column twice already, I have given myself journalistic license to use what he wrote, even though this column is supposed to be written by me. See how it works? Journalists love it when other journalists steal their stuff -- just as long as you give them credit and spell their names correctly.)

Anyway, here's the piece from Tom's column (I threw in this gratuitous reference to his column just for insurance). It's called "Amerika." By the way, in his column Tom confessed that he stole it from somebody else. But he didn't say who wrote it. Tsk, tsk, Tom.

Here goes:

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five-year phase-in plan that would be known as Euro-English.

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c." Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favor of the "k." This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replased with the "f." This will make words like "fotograf" 20 percent shorter.

Governments will enkorage the removal of double leters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful, and it should go away.

By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" wiz "v." During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "ou" and similar changes vud of kurs be aplid to ozer kombinations ov leters.

After ze fifz yer, ve vil hav a rali sensibl ritn styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis, and evirun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer.

Zen ze drem vil finali kum tru.

(By the way, my computer spell checker just went nuts after scanning this column -- with what I wrote, not with the "Amerika" piece. Go figure.)

R. Jo Sulivan is ze editor of ze Suthest Misuran.