'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

Lingo Lozenge

I spelt it ‘lozzange’ then, ‘lozange’, tried it without an ‘e’, which just looked wrong, then went to ‘spell check’. I admit it. I can’t spell, but what is spelling but the shadow of mindless authority?

It’s not just English. Any lingo makes you memorise the spelling of each word, rather than get to it logically. I mean, why ‘i before e except after c.’? Why? Because it’s such a nice rhyme for people to learn, maybe. And why are there letters, which are silent? If they are silent then they won’t shout about not being there. Why two ‘t’s’ in letter and why two ‘l’s’ in spell? And why one ‘z’ in lozenge, which sounds like a definite ‘two zeder’ to me. Or is that ‘two-zeder’, or ‘two-zedder’?

Latin may possibly be logical enough to be called ‘the exception’, but I bet that it divides objects into male and female categories. Now, if I don’t know the sex of a word from one of the so-called ‘romantic’ languages, I always go for female. Even a pen is female. Just look at a pen. Does it look female? You worry me if you think so.

Text-spell is a reaction to all this crap. We had it coming. Not so much a lozenge as an enema, I’d say. But the fact is that if you want to seriously streamline text, you would use shorthand. Why aren’t we taught shorthand, rather than the words we use, and what are those stenograph machines transcribers use in a courtroom? Is there something that we are missing here?

My gut tells that as much as I love our language, in its written form we are being sold, not a pup, but a knackered old carthorse. The fact is that they want to teach us for longer and longer to learn what they want us to learn, no matter the sense of it. And the spelling of our beautiful language makes no sense at all.

By the end of this century, no normal person will be able to understand this writing. It will be more remote to them than Chaucer is to us. In the meantime, it would help if they dumped all the garbage that over the centuries has piled up around our written word, as would any good Roman.        

Note: I am now told that there is a campaign to simplify the spelling of English. British children apparently spend three times as long learning to spell than their European counterparts. Double letters in words are one of the main bugbears. Although there will always be differences in the spelling of English from one country to another, my hope is that all English Speaking countries will cooperate in a general overhaul of their spelling, avoiding the complete fragmentation of our written word.

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