Words

English words, to be precise. The little tools I use to create little worlds for my amusement. What about them? Well in this post, I'm going to talk about how they came to be so annoying to write them "properly." We're talking about spelling here. I promise not to make this into a rant about how English words are spelled seemingly randomly, though I will have to keep a tight rain reign - rein on my temper.

I will readily admit that I am a terrible speller, but then, English is a terribly spelled language. In one of the videos I'm going to mention, the fellow said that fully 70% of English words actually follow some sort of rule. Wow! That, folks, is a "D" grade in English. It seems that I spelled as well at the English language does itself. He goes on to say that a lot of the "rules" are known only to those who specialize in the study of the language. In short, unless you get an university degree in the study of words and language (I'm too lazy to look up the term) you have to learn to spell correctly by rote memorization. A deep knowledge of phonetics may help, but it's hardly a surefire method. I have neither the talent to rote memorize, nor any training in phonetics - I doubt they taught it sixty years ago, like they may do today. I am, therefore a terrible speller, but thanks to the computer, I can overcome that handicap.

However, there is a cost. My handwriting, never elegant, is now almost unreadable, and I've developed a fear of using it for anything more than a shopping list. I've become so reliant on my computer's spell checking, that I just don't trust myself to spell anything correctly without it. This is also true: in several of the jobs I've had, I had to make shelf signs, advertising specials, etc., and found that if I stared any length of time at a word as simple as "The" I would began to feel uneasy, as to if I spelled it right. It would begin to look wrong, even though I couldn't think of another way to spell the word. Anyway, this is just the intro to what I really want to talk about, and that is the YouTube video channels that talk about words and the English language which I find interesting. I find a lot of things interesting that I never have any interest in doing.

The first video I what to highlight is this one from Let Them Talk TV which you can find HERE In this video the host, Gideon outlines the events of the last 1500 years that have gone into making English spelling such a chaotic mess. Briefly, the people of Britain had their own alphabet, a variation of the runic ones found across Northern Europe. My other word  channel Robwords recently had a whole episode on this topic HERE that you can watch to learn more them. In any event, the short story is that in the sixth century the Catholic church wanted its scribes in England to use the Latin alphabet rather than the runic one. The problem was that the runic one had letters for sounds that the English used, but Romans didn't, so that over time, combinations of Roman letters came to be used to make these sounds. But then the Normans conquered England and brought their French spellings into English. Plus, the monks who copied text used a form of the text that was almost all straight vertical lines, making them almost unreadable, so they added some letters to words to distinguish them. And then printing came along, and in order to justify the line of text left and right, the printers would add letters to some words just to make the line even on the right. And then the way the English pronounced their language changed over the course of two centuries, while the spelling did not. And then the renaissance happened and scholars wanted the words to better reflect what they thought was the Latin root word so they added letters that were not pronounced to look like the Latin root word... And so it goes. 

Robwords also posted a recent video on all the words Shakespeare is said to have invented HERE.  There are some 1,700 of them, made by more or less creatively combining words, or using them in unaccustomed ways. Ah, those were the days. And in some ways, they are still those days, at least on social media where English is evolving or decaying, quite happily. But the fact is that these videos show that the English language has always been changing, generation to generation, century to century, as society changes. This fact seems to be lost on some people. The people in particular who were able to master the rules and proper uses and spelling - 20 or 30 years ago. And unless they have changed with time and English usage, (Unlikely) they've become out of step with current English. Still, especially in the early self-published ebook days, you'd frequently find them in book reviews pointing out all the errors in English usage and spelling, and bemoaning the ignorance of the writers, if only to make a point of exhibiting their superior knowledge of the supposedly "right" way to use the language. It was a hill they seemed happy to die on. And die on it they will. Phuc'em.

Not that it really bothered me. My early efforts did have more typos then I realized, so I can only thank them for pointing them out. As for grammar, well my stories are written from within the story itself by a character in the story and in the vernacular, a much more loose version of English. A third person narrator, on the other hand, is a professional novelist telling the story from the outside, and can be expected to use more proper English. That's my story, anyways.

In any event, both of these channels offer many interesting stories about words - how they came to be, were used, and where they originally came from and meant. All very interesting.

Back in the day, it was thought that the internet would open up the world to knowledge, and it does. But I've found that YouTube makes all that knowledge much more entertaining to learn. These days, I have too much time during the day, and so I spend too much time on YouTube. However, if I learn something new, I can justify it. In a future post I think I might go through the YouTube channels that I watch, and all the stuff that I learn about but will never use.

Next week, however, more thoughts on my 2026 Project. Stay tuned.