JUST have a glance at the messages on your cell phone, you’ll realize spelling is changing; gone are the old traditional ways of orthography; now its minimum letters to get maximum meaning across.
However, a guest appearance I made some time ago took the cake: It was organized by a large TV channel, and speaker after speaker spoke on perfection in reporting, editing and achieving excellence in writing. “Were you impressed?” asked the producer after the rather long speeches. “Will this be televised tonight?” I asked.
“Of course!” said the man smiling at me. “Excellence is a good subject to teach people, and viewers should know we journalists are striving to attain such heights!” “Then you better do some quick editing,” I said and pointed to the banner behind the podium where speakers had spoken from: On it in bold letters was written, “Media Seminar” instead of ‘seminar’.
Excellence should have started at home! Maybe I’m being harsh; many, many famous people including writers who never had the advantage like we of ‘spell check’ were bad spellers. Fitzgerald was one, and after the publication of his first novel, the New York Tribune invited its readers to participate in a competition to see who would find the largest number of mistakes in Fitzgerald’s novel.
A Harvard scholar won with a list totaling a hundred! John Holiday peppery founder and editor of The Indianapolis News stormed into the composing room of his newspaper one day determined to find the culprit who had spelt height as ‘hight’.
A check of the original copy showed that it was spelt ‘hight’ and furthermore the copy was written by Mr Holiday himself. ‘If that’s the way I spelt it, that’s correct!’ he said and height was spelt ‘hight’ in The Indianapolis News for the next thirty years. After all, he was the editor. More powerful than the dictionary!
And so are Queens: Queen Victoria grew irritable with the Princess Royal whenever she misspelt a word, “I must tell you, “ she wrote to her, “that you have misspelt several words several times, which you must attend to, for if others saw it, they might think you have not been taught well!”
And then the good ole queen herself made blunders like going into ‘extacies,’ and finding things ‘shocking’ and ‘bewildering!’ But then she was the Queen. I wonder what the producer did? I suspect the only part he edited was my tiny appearance onscreen: “Seminar will remain seminar!” But then he was the producer…!
—Email: bobsbanter@gmail.com
