When the author of "The Cathedral" was accosted by the wandering
Englishmen within the lofty aisles of Chartres, he cracked a joke,
"Whereat they stared, then laughed, and we were friends,
The seas, the wars, the centuries interposed,
Abolished in the truce of common speech
And mutual comfort of the mother-tongue."
In this common speech other Englishmen are not always ready to
acknowledge the full rights of Lowell's countryman. They would put us
off with but a younger brother's portion of the mother-tongue, seeming
somehow to think that they are more closely related to the common parent
than we are. But Orlando, the younger son of Sir Rowland du Bois, was no
villain; and though we have broken with the father-land, the
mother-tongue is none the less our heritage. Indeed we need not care
whether the division _per stirpes_ or _per capita_, our share is not the
less in either case.
Beneath the impotent protests which certain British newspapers are prone
to make every now and again against the "American language" as a whole,
and against the stray Americanism which has happened last to invade
England, there is a tacit assumption that we Americans are outer
barbarians, mere strangers, wickedly tampering with something which
belongs to the British exclusively. And the outcry against the "American
language" is not as shrill nor as piteous as the shriek of horror with
which certain of the journals of London greet "American spelling," a
hideous monster, which they feared was ready to devour them as soon as
the international copyright bill should become law. In the midst of
every discussion of the effect of the copyright act in Great Britain,
the bugbear of "American spelling" reared its grisly head. The London
_Times_ declared that English publishers would never put any books into
type in the United States because the people of England would never
tolerate the peculiarities of orthography which prevailed in American
printing-offices. The _St. James's Gazette_ promptly retorted that
"already newspapers in London are habitually using the ugliest forms of
American spelling, and those silly eccentricities do not make the
slightest difference in their circulation." The _Times_ and the _St.
James's Gazette_ might differ as to the effect of the copyright act on
the profits of the printers of England, but they agreed heartily as to
the total depravity of "American spelling." I think that any
disinterested foreigner who might chance to hear these violent outcries
would suppose that English orthography was as the law of the Medes and
Persians, which altereth not; he would be justified in believing that
the system of spelling now in use in Great Britain was hallowed by the
Established Church, and in some way mysteriously connected with the
State religion. Indeed, no other explanation would suffice to account
for the vigor, the violence, and the persistency of the protests.
Just what the British newspapers are afraid of it is not easy to say and
it is difficult to declare just what they mean when they talk of
"American spelling." Probably they do not refer to the improvements in
orthography suggested by the first great American--Benjamin Franklin.
Possibly they do refer to the modifications in the accepted spelling
proposed by another American, Noah Webster--not so great, and yet not to
be named slightingly by any one who knows how fertile his labors have
been for the good of the whole country. Noah Webster, so his biographer,
Mr. Scudder, tells us, "was one of the first to carry a spirit of
democracy into letters.... Throughout his work one may detect a
confidence in the common-sense of the people which was as firm as
Franklin's." But the innovations of Webster were hesitating and often
inconsistent; and the most of them have been abandoned by later editors
of Webster's _American Dictionary of the English Language_.
What, then, do British writers mean when they animadvert upon "American
spelling?" So far as I have been able to discover, the British
journalists object to certain minor labor-saving improvements of
American orthography, such as the dropping of the _k_ from _almanack_,
the omission of one _g_ from _waggon_, and the like; and they protest
with double force, with all the strength that in them lies, against the
substitution of a single _l_ for a double _l_ in such words as
_traveller_, against the omission of the _u_ from such words as
_honour_, against the substitution of an _s_ for a _c_ in such words as
_defence_, and against the transposing of the final two letters of such
words as _theatre_. The objection to "American spelling" may lie deeper
than I have here suggested, and it may have a wider application; but I
have done my best to state it fully and fairly as I have deduced it from
a painful perusal of many columns of exacerbated British writing.
Now if I have succeeded in stating honestly the extent of the British
journalistic objections to "American spelling," the unprejudiced reader
may be moved to ask: "Is this all? Are these few and slight and
unimportant changes the cause of this mighty commotion?" One may agree
with Sainte-Beuve in thinking that "orthography is the beginning of
literature," without discovering in these modifications from the
Johnsonian canon any cause for extreme disgust. And since I have quoted
Sainte-Beuve once, I venture to cite him again, and to take from the
same letter of March 15, 1867, his suggestion that "if we write more
correctly, let it be to express especially honest feelings and just
thoughts."
Feelings may be honest though they are violent, but irritation is not
the best frame of mind for just thinking. The tenacity with which some
of the newspapers of London are wont to defend the accepted British
orthography is perhaps due rather to feeling than to thought. Lowell
told us that esthetic hatred burned nowadays with as fierce a flame as
ever once theological hatred; and any American who chances to note the
force and the fervor and the frequency of the objurgations against
"American spelling" in the columns of the _Saturday Review_, for
example, and of the _Athenaeum_, may find himself wondering as to the
date of the papal bull which declared the infallibility of contemporary
British orthography, and as to the place where the council of the Church
was held at which it was made an article of faith.
The _Saturday Review_ and the _Athenaeum_, highly pitched as their voices
are, yet are scarcely shriller in their cry to arms against the
possible invasion of the sanctity of British orthography by "American
spelling" than is the London _Times_, the solid representative of
British thought, the mighty organ-voice of British feeling. Yet the
_Times_ is not without orthographic eccentricities of its own, as
Matthew Arnold took occasion to point out. In his essay on the "Literary
Influence of Academies," he asserts that "every one has noticed the way
in which the _Times_ chooses to spell the word _diocese_; it always
spells it _diocess_, deriving it, I suppose, from _Zeus_ and
_census_.... Imagine an educated Frenchman indulging himself in an
orthographical antic of this sort!"
When we read what is written in the _Times_ and the _Saturday Review_
and the _Athenaeum_, sometimes in set articles on the subject, and even
more often in casual and subsidiary slurs in the course of book-reviews,
we wonder at the vehemence of the feeling displayed. If we did not know
that ancient abuses are often defended with more vigor and with louder
shouts than inheritances of less doubtful worth, we might suppose that
the present spelling of the English language was in a condition
perfectedly satisfactory alike to scholar and to student. Such, however,
is not the case. The leading philologists of Great Britain and of the
United States have repeatedly denounced English spelling as it now is on
both sides of the Atlantic. Professor Max Mueller at Oxford is no less
emphatic than Professor Whitney at Yale. There is now living no scholar
of any repute who any longer defends the orthodox and ordinary
orthography of the English language.
The fact is that a little learning is quite as dangerous a thing now as
it was in Pope's day. Those who are volubly denouncing "American
spelling" in the columns of British journals are not students of the
history of English speech; they are not scholars in English; in so far
as they know anything of the language, they are but amateur
philologists. As a well-known writer on spelling reform once neatly
remarked, "The men who get their etymology by inspiration are like the
poor in that we have them always with us." Although few of them are as
ignorant and dense as the unknown unfortunate who first tortured the
obviously jocular _Welsh rabbit_ into a pedantic and impossible _Welsh
rarebit_, still the most of their writing serves no good purpose; to
quote the apt illustration of a Western humorist, "It has as little
influence as the _p_ in _pneumonia_." Nor do we discover in these
specimens of British journalism that abundant urbanity which etymology
might lead us to look for in the writing of inhabitants of so large a
city as London.
Any one who takes the trouble to inform himself on the subject will soon
discover that it is only the half-educated man who defends the
contemporary orthography of the English language, and who denounces the
alleged "American spelling" of _center_ and _honor_. The uneducated
reader may wonder perchance what the _g_ is doing in _sovereign_; the
half-educated reader discerns in the _g_ a connecting link between the
English _sovereign_ and the Latin _regno_; the well-educated reader
knows that there is no philological connection whatever between _regno_
and _sovereign_.
The most of those who write with ease in British journals, deploring the
prevalence of "American spelling," have never carried their education
so far as to acquire that foundation of wisdom which prevents a man from
expressing an opinion on subjects as to which he is ignorant. The object
of education, it has been said, is to make a man know what he knows, and
also to know how much he does not know. Despite the close sympathy
between the intellectual pursuits, a student of optics is not qualified
to express an opinion in esthetics; and on the other hand, a critic of
art may easily be ignorant of science. Now literature is one of the
arts, and philology is a science. Though men of letters have to use
words as the tools of their trade, orthography is none the less a branch
of philology, and philology does not come by nature. Literature may even
exist without writing, and therefore without spelling. Homer, the
trouveres, and the minnesingers practised their art perhaps without the
aid of letters. Writing, indeed, has no necessary connection with
literature, still less has orthography. A literary critic is rarely a
scientific student of language; he has no need to be; but being
ignorant, it is the part of modesty for him not to expose his
ignorance. To boast of it is unseemly.
Far be it from me to appear as the defender of the "American spelling"
which the British journalists denounce. This "American spelling" is less
absurd than the British spelling only in so far as it has varied
therefrom. Even in these variations there is abundant absurdity. Once
upon a time most words that now are spelled with a final _c_ had an
added _k_. Even now both British and American usage retains this _k_ in
_hammock_, although both British and Americans have dropped the needless
letter from _havoc_; while the British retain the _k_ at the end of
_almanack_ and the Americans have dropped it. Dr. Johnson was a
reactionary in orthography as in politics; and in his dictionary he
wilfully put a final _k_ to words like _optick_, without being generally
followed by the publick--as he would have spelled it. Music was then
_musick_, although, even as late as Aubrey's time, it had been
_musique_. In our own day we are witnessing the very gradual
substitution of the logical _technic_ for the form originally imported
from France--_technique_. As yet, so far as I have observed, no
attempts have been made to modify the foreign spelling of _clique_ and
_oblique_.
I am inclined to think that technic is replacing _technique_ more
rapidly--or should I say less slowly?--in the United States than in
Great Britain. We Americans like to assimilate our words and to make
them our own, while the British have rather a fondness for foreign
phrases. A London journalist recently held up to public obloquy as an
"ignorant Americanism" the word _program_, although he would have found
it set down in Professor Skeat's _Etymological Dictionary_. "_Programme_
was taken from the French," so a recent writer reminds us, "and in
violation of analogy, seeing that, when it was imported into English, we
had already _anagram_, _cryptogram_, _diogram_, _epigram_, etc." The
logical form _program_ is not common even in America, and British
writers seem to prefer the French form, as British speakers still give a
French pronunciation to _charade_, which in America has long since been
accepted frankly as an English word. So we find Mr. Andrew Lang, in his
_Angling Sketches_, referring to the _asphalte_: surely in our language
the word is either _asphaltum_ or _asphalt_.
Here, if the excursus may be permitted, I should like to note also that
the American willingness to acknowledge the English language as good
enough for the ordinary purposes of speech shows itself in our
acceptance of certain words of foreign origin as now fully naturalized,
and therefore so to be treated. The Americans are inclined to consider
that _formula_, for example, and _criterion_ and _memorandum_ and
_cherub_ and _bureau_ are now good English words, forming their plurals
by the addition of an _s_. Our first cousins, once removed, across the
Atlantic seem to be still in doubt; and therefore we find them making
the plurals of these words in accordance with the rules of the various
languages from which the several words were derived. So in British books
we meet the Latin plurals, _formulae_ and _memoranda_; the Greek plural,
_criteria_; the Hebrew plural, _cherubim_; and the French plural,
_bureaux_. Oddly enough, the writers who use these foreign plurals are
unwilling to admit that the word thus modified is a foreign word, for
more often than not they print it without italics, although frankly
foreign words are carefully italicized. Possibly it is idle to look for
any logic in anything which has to do with modern English orthography on
either side of the ocean.
Perhaps, however, there is less even than ordinary logic in the British
journalist's objection to the so-called "American spelling" of _meter_;
for why should any one insist on _metre_ while unhesitatingly accepting
its compound _diameter_? Mr. John Bellows, in the preface to his
inestimable French-English and English-French pocket dictionary, one of
the very best books of reference ever published, informs us that "the
Act of Parliament legalizing the use of the metric system in this
country [England] gives the words meter, liter, gram, etc., spelled on
the American plan." Perhaps now that the sanction of law has been given
to this spelling, the final _er_ will drive out the _re_ which has
usurped its place. In one of the last papers that he wrote, Lowell
declared that "_center_ is no Americanism; it entered the language in
that shape, and kept it at least as late as Defoe." "In the sixteenth
and in the first half of the seventeenth century," says Professor
Lounsbury, "while both ways of writing these words existed side by side,
the termination _er_ is far more common than that in _re_. The first
complete edition of Shakespeare's plays was published in 1623. In that
work _sepulcher_ occurs thirteen times; it is spelled eleven times with
_er_. _Scepter_ occurs thirty-seven times; it is not once spelled with
_re_, but always with _er_. _Center_ occurs twelve times, and in nine
instances out of the twelve it ends in _er_." So we see that this
so-called "American spelling" is fully warranted by the history of the
English language. It is amusing to note how often a wider and a deeper
study of English will reveal that what is suddenly denounced in Great
Britain as the very latest Americanism, whether this be a variation in
speech or in spelling, is shown to be really a survival of a previous
usage of our language, and authorized by a host of precedents.
Of course it is idle to kick against the pricks of progress, and no
doubt in due season Great Britain and her colonial dependencies will be
content again to spell words that end in _er_ as Shakespeare and Ben
Jonson and Spenser spelled them. But when we get so far towards the
orthographic millennium that we all spell _sepulcher_, the ghost of
Thomas Campbell will groan within the grave at the havoc then wrought in
the final line of "Hohenlinden," which will cease to end with even the
outward semblance of a rhyme to the eye. We all know that
"On Linden, when the sun was low,
All bloodless lay the untrodden snow,
And dark as winter was the flow
Of Iser, rolling rapidly,"
and those of us who have persevered may remember that with one exception
every fourth line of Campbell's poem ends with a y--the words are
_rapidly_, _scenery_, _revelry_, _artillery_, _canopy_, and
_chivalry_--not rhymes of surpassing distinction, any of them, but
perhaps passable to a reader who will humor the final syllable. The one
exception is the final line of the poem--
"Shall be a soldier's _sepulchre_."
To no man's ear did _sepulchre_ ever rhyme justly with _chivalry_ and
_canopy_ and _artillery_, although Campbell may have so contorted his
vision that he evoked the dim spook of a rhyme in his mind's eye. A
rhyme to the eye is a sorry thing at best, and it is sorriest when it
depends on an inaccurate and evanescent orthography.
Dr. Johnson was as illogical in his keeping in and leaving out of the
_u_ in words like _honor_ and _governor_ as he was in many other things;
and the makers of later dictionaries have departed widely from his
practice, those in Great Britain still halting half-way, while those in
the United States have gone on to the bitter end. The illogic of the
great lexicographer is shown in his omission of the _u_ from _exterior_
and _posterior_, and his retention of it in the kindred words
_interiour_ and _anteriour_; this, indeed, seems like wilful perversity,
and justifies flood's merry jest about "Dr. Johnson's Contradictionary."
The half-way measures of later British lexicographers are shown in their
omission of the _u_ from words which Dr. Johnson spelled _emperour_,
_governour_, _oratour_, _horrour_, and _dolour_, while still retaining
it in _favour_ and _honour_ and a few others.
The reason for his disgust generally given by the London man of letters
who is annoyed by the "American spelling" of _honor_ and _favor_ is that
these words are not derived directly from the Latin, but indirectly
through the French; this is the plea put forward by the late Archbishop
Trench. Even if this plea were pertinent, the application of this theory
is not consistent in current British orthography, which prescribes the
omission of the _u_ from _error_ and _emperor_, and its retention in
_colour_ and _honour_--although all four words are alike derived from
the Latin through the French. And this plea fails absolutely to account
for the _u_ which the British insist on preserving in _harbour_ and in
_neighbour_, words not derived from the Latin at all, whether directly
or indirectly through the French. An American may well ask, "If the _u_
in _honour_ teaches etymology, what does the _u_ in _harbour_ teach?"
There is no doubt that the _u_ in _harbour_ teaches a false etymology;
and there is no doubt also that the _u_ in _honour_ has been made to
teach a false etymology, for Trench's derivation of this final _our_
from the French _eur_ is absurd, as the old French was _our_, and
sometimes _ur_, sometimes even _or_. Pseudo-philology of this sort is no
new thing. Professor Max Mueller tells us that the Roman prigs used to
spell _cena_ (to show their knowledge of Greek), _coena_, as if the
word were somehow connected with [Greek: koine].
Thus we see that the _u_ in _honour_ suggests a false etymology; so does
the _ue_ in _tongue_, and the _g_ in _sovereign_, and the _c_ in
_scent_, and the _s_ in _island_, and the _mp_ in _comptroller_, and the
_h_ in _rhyme_; and there are many more of our ordinary orthographies
which are quite as misleading from a philological point of view. As
Professor Hadley mildly put it, "our common spelling is often an
untrustworthy guide to etymology." But why should we expect or desire
spelling to be a guide to etymology? If it is to be a guide at all, we
may fairly insist on its being trustworthy, and so we cannot help
thinking scorn of those who insist on retaining a superfluous _u_ in
_honour_.
But why should orthography be made subservient to etymology? What have
the two things in common? They exist for wholly different ends, to be
attained by wholly different means. To bend either from its own work to
the aid of the other is to impair the utility of both. This truth is
recognized by all etymologists, and by all students of language,
although it has not yet found acceptance among men of letters, who are
rarely students of language in the scientific sense. "It may be
observed," Mr. Sweet declares, "that it is mainly among the class of
half-taught dabblers in philology that etymological spelling has found
its supporters;" and he goes on to say that "all true philologists and
philological bodies have uniformly denounced it as a monstrous absurdity
both from a practical and a scientific point of view." I should never
dare to apply to the late Archbishop Trench and the London journalists
who echo his errors so harsh a phrase as Mr. Sweet's "half-taught
dabblers in philology;" but when a fellow-Englishman uses it perhaps I
may venture to quote it without reproach.
As I have said before, the alleged "American spelling" differs but very
slightly from that which prevails in England. A wandering New-Yorker who
rambles through London is able to collect now and again evidences of
orthographic survivals which give him a sudden sense of being in an
older country than his own. I have seen a man whose home was near
Gramercy Park stop short in the middle of a little street in Mayfair,
and point with ecstatic delight to the strip of paper across the glass
door of a bar proclaiming that CYDER was sold within. I have seen the
same man thrill with pure joy before the shop of a _chymist_ in the
window of which _corn-plaisters_ were offered for sale. And this same
New-Yorker was carried back across the years when he noted the extra _g_
in the British _waggon_--an orthographic fifth wheel, if ever there was
one; he smiled at the _k_ which lingers at the end of the British
_almanack_; he wondered why a British house should have _storeys_ when
an American house has _stories_; and he disliked intensely the wanton
_e_ wherewith British printers have recently disfigured _form_ which in
the latest London typographical vocabularies appears as _forme_. This
_e_ in _form_ is a gratuitous addition, and therefore contrary to the
trend of spelling reform, which aims at the suppression of all arbitrary
and needless letters. Most of the American modifications of the
Johnsonian orthography have been labor-saving devices, like the dropping
of _u_ in _color_ and of one _l_ in _traveler_, in an effort at
simplification, and in accord with the irresistible tendency of mankind
to cut across lots.
The so-called "American spelling" differs from the spelling which
obtains in England only in so far as it has yielded a little more
readily to the forces which make for progress, for uniformity, for
logic, for common-sense. But just how fortuitous and chaotic the
condition of English spelling is nowadays both in Great Britain and in
the United States no man knows who has not taken the trouble to
investigate for himself. In England, the reactionary orthography of
Samuel Johnson is no longer accepted by all. In America, the
revolutionary orthography of Noah Webster has been receded from even by
his own inheritors. There is no standard, no authority, not even that of
a powerful, resolute, and domineering personality.
Perhaps the attitude of philologists towards the present spelling of the
English language, and their opinion of those who are up in arms in
defence of it, have never been more tersely stated than in Professor
Lounsbury's recent and most admirable _Studies in Chaucer_, a work which
I should term eminently scholarly, if that phrase did not perhaps give
a false impression of a book wherein the results of learning are set
forth with the most adroit literary art, and with an uninsistent but
omnipresent humor, which is a constant delight to the reader:
"There is certainly nothing more contemptible than our present spelling,
unless it be the reasons usually given for clinging to it. The divorce
which has unfortunately almost always existed between English letters
and English scholarship makes nowhere a more pointed exhibition of
itself than in the comments which men of real literary ability make upon
proposals to change or modify the cast-iron framework in which our words
are now clothed. On one side there is an absolute agreement of view on
the part of those who are authorized by their knowledge of the subject
to pronounce an opinion. These are well aware that the present
orthography hides the history of the word instead of revealing it; that
it is a stumbling-block in the way of derivation or of pronunciation
instead of a guide to it; that it is not in any sense a growth or
development, but a mechanical malformation, which owes its existence to
the ignorance of early printers and the necessity of consulting the
convenience of printing-offices. This consensus of scholars makes the
slightest possible impression upon men of letters throughout the whole
great Anglo-Saxon community. There is hardly one of them who is not
calmly confident of the superiority of his opinion to that of the most
famous special students who have spent years in examining the subject.
There is hardly one of them who does not fancy he is manifesting a noble
conservatism by holding fast to some spelling peculiarly absurd, and
thereby maintaining a bulwark against the ruin of the tongue. There is
hardly one of them who has any hesitation in discussing the question in
its entirety, while every word he utters shows that he does not even
understand its elementary principles. There would be something
thoroughly comic in turning into a fierce international dispute the
question of spelling _honor_ without the _u_, were it not for the
depression which every student of the language cannot well help feeling
in contemplating the hopeless abysmal ignorance of the history of the
tongue which any educated man must first possess in order to become
excited over the subject at all." (_Studies in Chaucer_, vol. iii., pp.
265-7.)
Pronunciation is slowly but steadily changing. Sometimes it is going
further and further away from the orthography; for example, _either_ and
_neither_ are getting more and more to have in their first syllable the
long _i_ sound instead of the long _e_ sound which they had once.
Sometimes it is being modified to agree with the orthography; for
example, the older pronunciations of _again_ to rhyme with _men_, and of
_been_ to rhyme with _pin_, in which I was carefully trained as a boy,
seem to me to be giving way before a pronunciation in exact accord with
the spelling, _again_ to rhyme with _pain_, and _been_ to rhyme with
_seen_. These two illustrations are from the necessarily circumscribed
experience of a single observer, and the observation of others may not
bear me out in my opinion; but though the illustrations fall to the
ground, the main assertion, that pronunciation is changing, is
indisputable.
No doubt the change is less rapid than it was before the invention of
printing; far less rapid than it was before the days of the
public-school and of the morning newspaper. There are variations of
pronunciation in different parts of the United States and of Great
Britain as there are variations of vocabulary; but in the future there
will be a constantly increasing tendency for these variations to
disappear. There are irresistible forces making for uniformity--forces
which are crushing out Platt-Deutsch in Germany, Provencal in France,
Romansch in Switzerland. There is a desire to see a standard set up to
which all may strive to conform. In France a standard of pronunciation
is found at the performances of the Comedie Francaise; and in Germany,
what is almost a standard of vocabulary has been set in what is now
known as _Buehne-Deutsch_.
In France the Academy was constituted chiefly to be a guardian of the
language; and the Academy, properly conservative as it needs must be, is
engaged in a slow reform of French orthography, yielding to the popular
demand decorously and judiciously. By official action, also, the
orthography of German has been simplified and made more logical and
brought into closer relation with modern pronunciation. Even more
thorough reforms have been carried through in Italy, in Spain, and in
Holland. Yet neither French nor German, not Italian, Spanish, or Dutch,
stood half as much in need of the broom of reform as English, for in no
one of these languages were there so many dark corners which needed
cleaning out; in no one of them the difference between orthography and
pronunciation as wide; and in no one of them was the accepted spelling
debased by numberless false etymologies. Sometimes it seems as though
our orthography is altogether vile; that it is most intolerable and not
to be endured; that it calls not for the broom of reform, but rather for
the besom of destruction.
For any elaborate and far-reaching scheme of spelling reform, seemingly,
the time has not yet come, although, for all we know, we may be
approaching it all unwittingly, as few of us in 1860 foresaw the
Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. In the mean while, what is needed on
both sides of the Atlantic, in the United States as well as in Great
Britain, is a conviction that the existing orthography of English is not
sacred, and that to tamper with it is not high-treason. What is needed
is the consciousness that neither Samuel Johnson nor Noah Webster
compiled his dictionary under direct inspiration. What is needed is an
awakening to the fact that our spelling, so far from being immaculate at
its best, is, at its best, hardly less absurd than the hap-hazard,
rule-of-thumb, funnily phonetic spelling of Artemus Ward and of Josh
Billings. What is needed is anything which will break up the lethargy of
satisfaction with the accepted orthography, and help to open the eyes of
readers and writers to the stupidity of the present system and tend to
make them discontented with it.
So the few and slight divergences between the orthography obtaining in
Great Britain and the orthography obtaining in the United States are not
to be deplored. The _cyder_ on the door of the London bar-room and the
_catalog_ in the pages of the New York _Library Journal_ both subserve
the useful purpose of making people alive to the possibilities of an
amended orthography. Thus the so-called "American spelling" helps along
a good cause--and so, also, do the British assaults upon it.
1892