Spl Chkr Blooz

First published September 2, 2005

Hey, I have an idea. Let’s completely redesign the English language.

First a little background. Earlier in my career as a writer, sandwiched in between the days of chiseling my prose into the walls of King Tut’s Tomb and working on my PowerBook, I did all my writing on a thing called a “typewriter.”


Back in those days, writers had to have at least a vague idea how to spell the words we wanted to use. And if we screwed up, we had to try to spot the problem ourselves. We sometimes even had to “look up” words in a thing called a “dictionary!”

Boooooooring!

These days, whenever I hammer out a piece on my computer, the word processor’s spell-checker does a lot of the heavy lifting for me. All I have to do is get within a few bytes of a real word, and the computer will correct me or give me suggestions that are programmed right into the software, based on similar mistakes made by a scientifically selected panel of other morons.

Unfortunately, a guy like me who types with his elbows can easily slip right past that little electronic genius with a sentence like, “Let’s go to the beech with same friends!” They’re all words – just not quite the ones I had in mind.

Some people have suggested that we should improve spell-checkers to the point where they can analyze and correctly interpret the context of what you’re writing. I’m not even entirely sure what that means, much less how it would work.

Instead, I propose that we change the English language to bring it in line with spell-checkers. For instance, we can get rid of problems like “it’s” and “its” by simply getting rid of apostrophes. You could just write, “The dog is very happy; its licking its…” whatever it is he happens to be licking.

Likewise, you can get rid of your you’re issues, just like they can resolve their they’re problems. Over there.

Got that?

This wouldn’t be the first time our language got itself updated. Four hundred years ago, a teenager might stick a quill in the old quill-sharpener and dash off a note like this to a friend:

Soft, sweet companion, know that as friend do I love thee, and I would that thy visage light up this house, gracing this week’s end, dismal in every aspect without thee. Hearken thou hence after two of ‘t afternoon, for my mother deemest that I must practiceth my clarinet first... eth.

These days, a kid would handle that whole transaction in a text message:

CM OVR THS WKND FTR 2.

To which the friend might craft a heartfelt reply:

K

All right, maybe it’s not exactly a sonnet, but it gets the job done.

To get this whole thing started, I propose that we form a group called the Bureau Of Nearly Everybody Hacking English Down, or BONEHED. As a brotherhood and sisterhood of BONEHEDs, we can work together to bring our language at last into the twenty-first century.

So snd mi n email tday n syn up. Wi cn strt bi splng wrds lik thy snd n wthot al ths xtra ltrs!

And whatever you do, weep not for English – you can bet it ain’t weeping for you.

Copyright © 2005 Michael Ball