It has taken five hundred years to simplify some of Chaucer’s rotten spelling—if I may be allowed to use so frank a term as that—and it will take five hundred more to get our exasperating new Simplified Corruptions accepted and running smoothly. And we sha’n’t be any better off then than we are now; for in that day we shall still have the privilege the Simplifiers are exercising now: anybody can change the spelling that wants to.
But you can’t change the phonographic spelling; there isn’t any way. It will always follow the SOUND. If you want to change the spelling, you have to change the sound first.
Mind, I myself am a Simplified Speller; I belong to that unhappy guild that is patiently and hopefully trying to reform our drunken old alphabet by reducing his whiskey. Well, it will improve him. When they get through and have reformed him all they can by their system he will be only HALF drunk. Above that condition their system can never lift him. There is no competent, and lasting, and real reform for him but to take away his whiskey entirely, and fill up his jug with Pitman’s wholesome and undiseased alphabet.
One great drawback to Simplified Spelling is, that in print a simplified word looks so like the very nation! and when you bunch a whole squadron of the Simplified together the spectacle is very nearly unendurable.
The da ma ov koars kum when the publik ma be expektd to get rekonsyled to the bezair asspekt of the Simplified Kombynashuns, but—if I may be allowed the expression—is it worth the wasted time? (Figure 8)
To see our letters put together in ways to which we are not accustomed offends the eye, and also takes the expression out of the words.
La on, Makduf, and damd be he hoo furst krys hold, enuf!
It doesn’t thrill you as it used to do. The simplifications have sucked the thrill all out of it.
But a written character with which we are not acquainted does not offend us—Greek, Hebrew, Russian, Arabic, and the others—they have an interesting look, and we see beauty in them, too. And this is true of hieroglyphics, as well. There is something pleasant and engaging about the mathematical signs when we do not understand them. The mystery hidden in these things has a fascination for us: we can’t come across a printed page of shorthand without being impressed by it and wishing we could read it.
Very well, what I am offering for acceptance and adoption is not shorthand, but longhand, written with the Shorthand Alphabet Unreduced. You can write three times as many words in a minute with it as you can write with our alphabet. And so, in a way, it is properly a shorthand. It has a pleasant look, too; a beguiling look, an inviting look. I will write something in it, in my rude and untaught way: (Figure 9)