PHONETIC SPELLING

A correspondent asks me to make more lucid my remarks about phonetic spelling.  I have no detailed objection to items of spelling-reform; my objection is to a general principle; and it is this.  It seems to me that what is really wrong with all modern and highly civilised language is that it does so largely consist of dead words.  Half our speech consists of similes that remind us of no similarity; of pictorial phrases that call up no picture; of historical allusions the origin of which we have forgotten.  Take any instance on which the eye happens to alight.  I saw in the paper some days ago that the well-known leader of a certain religious party wrote to a supporter of his the following curious words:  “I have not forgotten the talented way in which you held up the banner at Birkenhead.”  Taking the ordinary vague meaning of the word “talented,” there is no coherency in the picture.  The trumpets blow, the spears shake and glitter, and in the thick of the purple battle there stands a gentleman holding up a banner in a talented way.  And when we come to the original force of the word “talent” the matter is worse:  a talent is a Greek coin used in the New Testament as a symbol of the mental capital committed to an individual at birth.  If the religious leader in question had really meant anything by his phrases, he would have been puzzled to know how a man could use a Greek coin to hold up a banner.  But really he meant nothing by his phrases.  “Holding up the banner” was to him a colourless term for doing the proper thing, and “talented” was a colourless term for doing it successfully.

Now my own fear touching anything in the way of phonetic spelling is that it would simply increase this tendency to use words as counters and not as coins.  The original life in a word (as in the word “talent”) burns low as it is:  sensible spelling might extinguish it altogether.  Suppose any sentence you like:  suppose a man says, “Republics generally encourage holidays.”  It looks like the top line of a copy-book.  Now, it is perfectly true that if you wrote that sentence exactly as it is pronounced, even by highly educated people, the sentence would run:  “Ripubliks jenrally inkurrij hollidies.”  It looks ugly:  but I have not the smallest objection to ugliness.  My objection is that these four words have each a history and hidden treasures in them:  that this history and hidden treasure (which we tend to forget too much as it is) phonetic spelling tends to make us forget altogether.  Republic does not mean merely a mode of political choice.  Republic (as we see when we look at the structure of the word) means the Public Thing:  the abstraction which is us all.