Webster’s Campaign for American Orthography

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, good afternoon.

Hi, who is this?

Doug Coburn. I’m calling from Brighton, Ontario, Canada.

Well, Doug, welcome to the show. We’re really happy to talk to you.

Hiya, Doug. What’s on your mind?

Well, what’s on my mind is my wife, Linda, and I always get into an argument about the word center, C-E-N-T-E-R, or C-E-N-T-R-E. We always get into this argument of which word we should be using in a sentence. And I just found it curious. One word with the same letters has two totally different meanings.

Wait, it has two different meanings or two different spellings?

Well, it has two different spellings and two different meanings.

How do you differentiate the meanings of those?

Center, C-E-N-T-E-R, is like the center of a target. Well, center, C-E-N-T-R-E, is like a medical center.

Oh, right. Like a facility of some kind.

Oh, I see. Okay, so you’re talking about, say, a place as opposed to the middle of something.

That’s correct. Okay.

I’ve never heard that meaning distinction between the two spellings, and none of the dictionaries that I know of make any reference at all to the fact that there may be a difference in meaning for the two spellings. They’re considered equal variants of the same word.

Now, are you looking at American dictionary or British?

I’m looking at everything, actually. I have Canadian, British, Australian, American, South African, you name it. If it’s in English, I have it.

You’ve got all the bases covered.

Yeah, I was a dictionary editor for a long time. You should see my shelves. I have tons and tons.

But it’s really interesting, though, right, Martha, this spelling difference. There’s somebody to blame, I think.

There is somebody to blame.

Noah Webster.

Do you know Noah’s story?

I know that, if I’m correct, that after the American Revolution, he thought America should have its own language. And he took a lot of British words and dropped the U out of them.

He did that. He suggested a lot of spelling changes, some of which stuck in this country and some of which didn’t. For example, he wanted to take the word soup, S-O-U-P, and spell it S-O-O-P. He thought that made more sense and looked more aesthetically pleasing. And the same with the word women.

That one didn’t stick either.

Wait, the Y spelling was his?

No, no, not the Y, but something very similar, the W-I-M-M-E-N. He proposed that for women.

That’s really interesting.

And that one didn’t stick, but center did in this country.

Yeah, S-E-R.

Yeah, we spelled it E-R. And it follows on many other words that the British and the Canadians also spell E-R. It’s only a handful of words that they do the R-E spelling for, right?

Right, right, like theater, for example.

So your debate about this with your wife, what are the sides here? What’s the claim?

Well, the argument is that I have always been a very poor speller all my life. That gene never got passed along from my parents. My wife, on the other hand, is a fantastic speller and is very good with words. So I kind of have to defer to her.

Well, you’re not to blame for this. There’s another really interesting thing happening in Canada. You’re like a piece of taffy stretched between two hands. And one of those hands is the United States, and the other one is the United Kingdom, at least in terms of spelling and language, okay?

I’ve never heard that analogy, but it’s very good. And there’s a really great book, so expertly done by Joe Clark a couple of years ago. It’s called Organizing Our Marvelous Neighbors. You can find it online. And he uses one of the variant spellings for marvelous and one of the variant spelling for neighbors and one of the variant spelling for organizing. And the entire premise of Organizing Our Marvelous Neighbors by Joe Clark is that Canadians do not have a consistent way to spell many of these words that the British and the Americans disagree on.

You guys are kind of stuck, and you will find from newspaper to newspaper or from school to school, from style guide to style guide, very different opinions on exactly how these spellings should be permanently put into Canadian English.

Yeah. So I guess you can spell it either way.

Yeah, you can.

So I may have a bit of ammunition here to win the odd argument with my wife.

Yeah, but it’s just that one word. You’re also going to have to get your act together on the rest of the words, you know.

Okay.

We’ll give our best to her, okay?

Yeah, and you know what? Don’t worry about this.

I will.

Don’t worry about the spelling. I always like to tell people that some of our greatest writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, were terrible spellers. So don’t worry too much about it. As long as your ideas are good, you’re okay. All right?

All right, then.

Great.

Take care now.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Have a good day.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

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