By All Means

Do you believe in signs?

You know, those little objects or encounters or symbols that life keeps throwing at you until you stop and pay attention, and try to figure out just what it all means? As though the universe were conspiring to teach you a lesson? I have a good friend who’s had this experience with feathers appearing by her feet in a bunch of different locations, week after week. Kind of spooky, right? And I’ve got another friend who kept encountering acorns; she came to learn that they’re a symbol of “strength, potential, immortality, power, and growth,” and made them a very significant symbol of her charitable organization. I think their stories are pretty cool, but that’s just an opinion. There is, however, also a fact that we can discover in these examples, and others like them, and here it is: human minds seek meaning. We look for meaning everywhere; that is the constant aim both of our brains and of our souls.

The obvious place to look for meaning, of course, is words. Words mean things; making meaning is their aim. I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate on my habit of doing just that — looking for meaning in words, and paying attention to see which words keep surfacing for investigation. Regular readers already know that I don’t just look for “meaning in words;” rather, I look for how words make their meaning in writing, and why they make it that way. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at just how liberally the ol’ universe can sprinkle its freaky serendipities into my experiences to make me stop and pay attention. After all, words are everywhere; it’s my job to figure out what they’re trying to tell me.

So I set out to write this post a couple of months ago, confident that that the words that were going to demand my attention for this post were the words <over> and <under>. I even had a great title: “Overcome with Understanding.” Cool, right? I’d picked those words because a few years ago, I’d had an encounter with <over> in an attic in France that, believe it or not, had quite undone me and my previous way of understanding English words. I really was overcome by the experience, and since it happened, I’ve also been able to overcome a lot of foggy misapprehensions about how the language works. In many ways, that encounter changed everything: I already knew a lot about English spelling before I went to France, but THAT, that moment was transfigurative. So this, this stubborn essay, was supposed to be about that encounter, that moment. It was supposed to be about <over>, and it was supposed to tell “my story;” that’s what I set out to write.

The post had asked to be written in conversations with a few friends and colleagues, far more diplomatic and less hotheaded than I, who encouraged me to tell “my story” as a way to, well, soften the sharp blow of my orthographic hammer. Since my own orthographic epiphany in France, I find an abundance of errors and misapprehensions in the work of edubloggers and spelling experts, curriculum designers and literacy researchers — well-known people whose work I never used to question. Now, I write about their errors — not only on LEX, but also in my doctoral writing, in conference presentations, and in private conversations. Many people find this inspiring: they sign on for greater understanding themselves, finding it as transformative of their work as I do, and together we celebrate our growing ability to make sense of spelling.

But not everyone loves what I do: some people find my work to be obnoxious, even going so far as to write truly nasty comments in their conference evaluations and correspondence, like “if she’s so smart, let her find her own mistakes” and “her voice is so grating.” One well-known writing expert recently mentioned me by name in a conference session where I wasn’t in attendance, berating me in absentia for being “out of line” — but not before pulling me aside privately to say, “Gina, if you attend my session, don’t say anything, okay?” I wonder what line I’m supposed to be in? Another spelling expert even implied in a widely-circulated email that I’m just not okay with being human. True story. I’ve been scolded and ignored by experts (usually the same ones who made the mistakes to begin with), complained about behind my back, and kicked off of a listserv with no prior dialogue. No one likes to be wrong, and some people will defend the errors entrenched in their thinking by any means available. In sharp contrast, my current scholarly community — including linguists and teachers, children and adults, eulexics and dyslexics alike — revels in discovering errors because it means uncovering the facts, learning what is real about language, and beholding the shining and revelatory truths that abide in the written language. My fellow orthographic pioneers — especially the friends who counseled this post — value my message enormously, and they want it to be heard. While they admit to finding me wickedly funny, they also say that they’d hate to see my message get muted or ignored because someone reading it might think it sounds mean.

I don’t mean to sound mean.

I thought about this for weeks. And weeks. Then I wrote for days and days — somewhere in there I lost a whole weekend writing about <over> in response to the friendly prompt, and I got nowhere. That whole weekend, minus time for dishes, and family, some homework, and a little sleep, gone, and I had nothing much to show for it. My story just wasn’t agreeing to be told. I mean, I certainly know my story (I went to France to study English spelling and I broke down weeping over <over>), and I’ve written about it before (rather fetchingly, I might add, in a final paper for a doctoral rhetoric seminar, which also contributed to a couple other posts). But as I wrote and wrote that weekend about over and under, nothing gelled. I got some middling prose that I may make use of later, but nothing that resembled a meaningful account of how I came to understand spelling or my role in the spelling world. I went to bed that Sunday barely prepared for the whirlwind of the coming week, feeling fruitless.

So here’s where the universe and its signs come in: I woke up that Monday morning to a new post on an edublog I sometimes read, and which I’ve posted about before. The blogger had blogged about, of all things, <over>, the very four-letter word that had precipitated my Damascene moment in France, when the scales fell from my eyes along with a few big, fat, fiery tears. In her post, the author referred to <over> as a prefix, something that I used to do before I knew better too, and there she was, making use of the same equivocations and “expert” opinions as I used to. She was, as I had been, in very good company: a whole lot of people call <over> a prefix.

I read her blog post, participated in a very worthwhile dialogue about it in the comments (which I strongly recommend reading), and headed out of the house for school and work. In the car (where I spent entirely too much time this past semester) I thought some about how I might be able to make use of the blogospheric coincidence. I thought about how I might write about my own transformative experience, when I had clearly seen how <over> cannot be a prefix, and about how devastated I had been to realize how many people I had misinformed. I thought, for the fiftieth time, about how incandescently frustrated I had been in that orthographic atelier in deepest Gaul, how embarrassed I was to be enraged and weeping in front of my colleagues and my teacher. I thought about how silly and stupid I’d felt: of course <over> was a base. I knew that! It’s a word! A free morpheme! It can’t be a prefix. I’m a linguist, for crying out loud; I understand these things. I never should’ve fallen for it when I first was mistaught <over> and <under> (and <with> and  <by> and <out> and a host of other freestanding bases) as prefixes years ago.

As I drove through my Midwestern landscape that Monday morning, I relived that continental epiphany, and I could just taste a better blog post brewing. I figured that my weekend writing had not really come together because somehow, it was cosmically waiting for a better set-up. I figured that better set-up had come in the form of the comment thread on the edublogger’s post, and I anticipated that it would help me to explain why orthographic truth matters. I crafted explanatory paragraphs in my head, and made some mental notes so I could record my thoughts for LEXterity later on. When I got tired of writing in my head, I turned on the car radio, and left it on, my thoughts still coming in fits and spurts. Before too long, a tune made its way from the radio to my consciousness, in the voice of Sinead O’Connor, that formerly depilated Celtic enchantress. I’d really never paid much attention to the song, though it was familiar to me. By the time I became fully attentive to the song, it was entering its last chorus. Here’s what I heard:

Maybe it sounds mean
but I really don’t think so
you asked for the truth and I told you.
Through their own words
they will be exposed
they’ve got a severe case of
the emperor’s new clothes.

Now, my husband, who has rather varied and wholly impeccable musical tastes, has warned me against becoming the kind of writer who quotes pop songs. And I suppose he’s right. So please, please forgive me for sounding like a lovesick 15-year-old, but this lyric took on all the import of the universe striking again. It was another linguistic feather landing at my feet, an acorn of promise, and I paid attention. As I heard the words, they seemed to be singing right to me. I mean, here I am, in my car, thinking about how I could write this post without sounding mean, and even as I do so, my brain, and my soul, are seeking meaning out there all around me. Even in a corny pop song.

Maybe I sound mean, but I really don’t think so.

I arrived at school, parked the car, and got busy with my week. It never ends, really. There’s family, and school, and work, and spelling — Heavens! I love spelling! There are the many, many conversations and e-conversations I partake in with my orthographic community. So things kept moving through my week, and my brain and my soul continued to search for ways to share a meaningful tale from my past, in order to shed some light on an orthographic future. I did a little thinking, and a little writing — usually both at the same time — but I still couldn’t make a satisfactory article out of <over>.

Well, that’s because the universe wasn’t done with me yet. The following morning, a Tuesday, I took my son to the dentist. Although I had brought homework along, I sat in the waiting area and thumbed through magazines instead, feeling profligate and guilty. Before too long, I lighted on an article by Ricky Gervais, a British comedian who had hosted some awards show or another, and who had written a response to accusations that his hostly humor was — you guessed it — too mean. Some folks had taken offense. I can’t recall much of what he wrote, but I do recall a distinction he made that seemed to my meaning-seeking machine of a mind to be another sign: Gervais responded to his detractors with the claim that offense is a question of feelings, while comedy is an enterprise of the intellect. While I recognize that emotions and intellect are not unrelated, I also think that Gervais is on to something. In Hollywood, when you make a life out of people watching your every move, being roasted for comedic effect is an occupational hazard. Likewise, in science, even in “reading science,” when you make a life out of publishing your findings, being proven wrong is also an occupational hazard.

Gervais’s article called to mind an undergraduate course I had observed for an assignment about a year ago. On the day I observed, the instructor was teaching his students about different types and theories of humor. One theory presented in class involved incongruity: things can seem funny when we discover them to be mismatched, or out of harmony with a paired concept or situation; when the mismatch is made explicit and resolved, we laugh. Another understanding was referred to as superiority theory, which is what might make us snicker when we see someone trip, or when we delight in the misfortunes of others. Superiority theory was even a consideration in classical Greece, where Socrates was roundly pilloried as ugly and filthy by the popular writers of his day. Now that’s mean: critiquing people’s looks or personal hygiene or humanity instead of their work.

When I got home from the dentist, I pulled up my notes from that humor class observation, and I was struck by what I found at the end of the notes: “Humor is a talent that can be learned. It’s useful in dealing with misfortunes or painful incongruities. It allows us to avoid despair.” In other words, humor is something that can help us navigate the interchange between intellect and emotion. Whereas Gervais’s article separated the intellectual exercise of comedy from the emotional exercise of taking offense, I understood humor as the very substance that allows us to move between an emotionally painful experience and a dispassionate intellectual understanding of it.

Now, lest you think that people cannot be driven to despair over spelling, let me make my story perfectly clear here: I work with children with dyslexia, and the people who love and teach them. Spelling, especially in school, is excruciating for them. It stymies their expression. It leaves them feeling stupid, silly, and inadequate. Even adults are vulnerable to condemnation on account of their spelling errors: we’ve all heard tales of the mythical orthographic gatekeepers in human resources departments ready to chuck a job application for a single spelling error. Prior to going to France, I had trained hundreds of teachers and supervised the instruction of hundreds of children. I taught people how spelling worked, or I meant to, anyways. I taught them what I knew, and I knew a lot, but much of what I knew was wrong because it was built upon a fundamental mischaracterization of English spelling as a flawed system of letter-sound correspondences, rather than as the orderly sense-making apparatus I now know it to be. Over the course of my career, I had taught many, many people that <over> and <under> and myriad other prepositions could also be prefixes, as I had been taught.

After a decade of this work, I traveled to France with a cadre of dyslexia colleagues for an orthographic study week. On the second day, I crowed to my colleagues that “a lot of English prefixes are prepositions, like with and under and over.” Our teacher, the Copernicus of English orthography, simply responded with a “hmmm” and a noncommittal sideways nod before continuing with his lesson. He felt no need to correct me there, knowing that I would soon discover the truth myself as the seminar continued. When I finally encountered the clear and logical fact that a morphological element cannot simultaneously be a base and an affix, my reaction was visceral. My gut knotted, my body responded with fire and water, and my affect leaked out of my eyes. I wasn’t crying because I was embarrassed to have been wrong in front of my colleagues; I had been wrong plenty of times during that week and had relished the opportunity to correct my understanding. What enraged and saddened me at that moment was the memory of arguing years earlier during my own training about this very thing. As a linguist, I had protested that words like undertow, withhold, and overdraft were compounds, not complex, because the first element was freestanding. J’ai pleuré because I had had the facts correct once upon a time, and I relinquished them because I bought the party line within my new field. I had changed my mind without even seeing evidence to the contrary. I wept for the facts, for how I had ignored them, and for the truth laid out before me in all its simple glory.

That moment was pivotal. While I can’t claim that I made an explicit decision in that moment, something in me broke right then: the willingness to pass along an understanding about language based on what someone else claimed without verifying it myself. I left France unable to continue my work as I had previously done it. What rose in me was a commitment to study the writing system, to teach people what I knew to be true, and to question the unchecked “expertise” that had been passed down to me professionally. Don’t misunderstand me — there was enormous value in the work I had done prior to France, and even my flawed understanding of English spelling had managed to help children, teachers, and parents improve their literacy lot in life. But the radiant golden truth of written language would illuminate my path in untold ways thenceforth. As I shared my new understanding with my colleagues, with children, and with anyone who would listen, scribbling word sums and matrices on napkins and envelopes and white boards, I saw their eyes open too — not all of them, but many — and together we emerged from the fog of confusion that had plagued our instruction and peppered it with “exceptions” and “irregularities” for years.

It isn’t always easy to walk this road. People want simple explanations for things, and “exception” is speciously simple. Long-held beliefs and practices are not easy to part with, and people tend to like the paradigms they have, whether they’re accurate or not. The pedagogy of tradition, the “we’ve-always-done-it-this-way” mindset, is powerful and omnipresent in language education. So is the cult of personality, where who said something often gets more credence than what is actually said. Some people complain about my work, usually to someone other than me, in my absence, and often anonymously. It is tempting to leave some experts’ errors alone, because they are famous, or kind, or influential, or because I really like them as people. Well-meaning friends and colleagues have warned me that it is politically unsavvy to critique certain people’s work. I’ve had to explain to people to whom I am indebted why I’m critiquing their work. Some of them have taken it very graciously, and made efforts to improve their own understanding. Others have not. Ultimately, I try to stay focused on critiquing the work, critiquing the errors, and not assailing the character, attitude, or intent of the individual who made them. I don’t think that my teacher in France, my Copernicus, was mean for teaching me the truth, even though it made me cry. Sometimes, learning the truth hurts, but that doesn’t mean it’s hateful.

You know what I mean?

So that’s my story, but it isn’t over. I had set out, pre-signs, to write about <over>, to tell how that one free morpheme asserting its clear identity has left me overcome with understanding, and how I had gone on to overcome the continuing challenges in my work by holding tightly to my newfound and resplendent orthographic understanding. But this story, this post, isn’t about over; over has been done, overdone, in fact, in the comments on the edublog post that beat me to the explanatory punch. No, THIS story, this post, is about mean. It’s about being mean, and about being meaningful, by all means. It took me a while to realize it, but all the signs were pointing to mean. My friends’ well-meant encouragement, Sinead O’Connor’s earworm, Ricky Gervais’s self defense — these comprised the universe’s conspiracy to lead me to investigate if and how I might, in fact, be mean.

Off to the Mactionary I went. I found three homonymic entries for <mean>, a verb, an adjective, and a noun, all etymologically unrelated but intertwined in the collective English-speaking psyche.

Here’s the verb:

mean 1 |miːn|
verb
1 intend to convey, indicate, or refer to (a particular thing or notion); signify . . . [to] be of some specified importance to someone.
2 intend (something) to occur or be the case.
3 have as a consequence or result.

According to Etymonline and the Oxford English Dictionary, the verb has an Old English root, mænan, “to mean, tell, say, complain.” This same root is also connected to the present-day word moan. By looking at the root, we know why the present-day word is spelled <mean> rather than *<meen> or *<mene> or <mien>. This free base element surfaces in the words meaning, meaningful, meaningless, and meant, and is traceable to a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) etymon *mei-no-, denoting ‘intent, opinion.’ Some scholars suggest a link to the PIE form *men-, which denotes ‘to think, mind,’ which would make mean an etymological cousin to mind, mental, mentor, comment, demented, summon, mnemonic, mania, mantra, and even museum.

Perhaps when the experts write and teach about inaccurate orthographic understandings like combining forms, or when they call free bases like prefixes, or when they make facile and unfounded etymological claims, they mean well. Perhaps when people rely on mnemonic devices and mantras instead of investigations and evidence in language education, their intent is good. More important than the intent in education, however, is the content and the portent. While I can’t speak to what anyone else intends to convey, I can speak to what it means to learn wrong things as though they were facts: it means that teachers and students continue to operate in a kind of word murk, and it means relying on exceptions and equivocations to bolster up a deeply flawed understanding.

Here’s the adjective:

mean 2 |miːn|
adjective
1 unwilling to give or share things, especially money; not generous.
2 unkind, spiteful, or unfair . . . vicious or aggressive in behavior
3 (esp. of a place) poor in quality and appearance . . . inferior, poor.
4 (informal) excellent; very skillful or effective: he’s a mean cook.

This adjective also has an Old English root, ġemæne, meaning ‘common, held jointly.’ In Old English words, <ġe> is a common grammatical prefix, which dropped by Middle English; it’s still used in present day German and Dutch and Yiddish, in words like gesundheit and gestalt and oy, gevalt! Anyhow, the base of the Old English word, <mæne,> is etymological cousin to the Latin word munus/munera, or moenus/moenera, from which derives the present-day English bases <mune> and <mon>, as in commune, community, communicate, immunize, and common.

The notion of viciousness or nastiness that is frequently associated with mean is a relatively recent development, having arisen only in Modern English. The related word common, in fact, has been used disparagingly for a far longer time, especially in reference to women and criminals. When folks suggest that I’m being mean (the adjective) because I seek and speak the facts of English orthography, they probably mean (the verb) that I’m being unkind or offensive. But what I’m really doing is being common; that is, I’m striving to make common an understanding of how written English works and doesn’t work. When I tell a Spelling Expert that Latin words indeed do compound, or that <over> is not a prefix, or that <able> is not an Anglo-Saxon suffix, I am offering information that is publicly available, jointly held by all English speakers and writers, universal, general, shared by all. I don’t own the facts of English orthography; rather, they’re mean. They belong to everyone, and they’re there for the taking, no expertise required. My aim in exposing the facts is not to change the experts’ minds: it is to equip the common person to change his or her own mind.

Here’s the noun:

mean 3 |miːn|
noun
1 the quotient of the sum of several quantities and their number; an average
2 a condition, quality, or course of action equally removed from two opposite (usually unsatisfactory) extremes.

This mean (the noun) derives from the Latin medianus, where we also get median. It denotes being in the middle, something that is between extremes. As a noun, it is used in math, but also colloquially, as in the saying by all means. It can also be used as an adjective, as in the mean home value or the mean age at marriage. In fact, its connotations of middleness lent it a sense of mediocrity that picked up on the connotations of commonness or baseness of the adjective mean. As I said, these distinct homonyms from distinct historical roots get all mixed up in the modern English-speaking mind.

But peeling apart the confusion gets really interesting for me in the existence of an Old English word mān, which was both a noun and an adjective, that meant ‘crime/criminal, shame(ful), wicked(ness), evil.’ But it had nothing to with the present-day adjective mean. Rather, most scholars agree that mān is cognate to the present-day verb mean — it has to do with evil or wicked intent, with the wish to do harm (Mitchell and Robinson, Bosworth and Toller, Calvert Watkins).

Here’s how the OED puts it:

“It has sometimes been supposed that the sense development of the word [the adjective mean] has been influenced by Old English mæne false, wicked . . . but this seems unlikely, as this adjective did not survive into Middle English, while the moral senses of mean only appear in modern English.”

So in other words, a word that had to do with evil intent fell out of use, and later on, another totally distinct word took on totally similar connotations. While there’s no evidence that mean the verb and mean the adjective are related, that doesn’t stop people from conflating them in their minds. So when people say that I’m being mean or warn me against being too mean, they are assuming an intent that Just. Isn’t. There.

Let me be perfectly clear: when I point to a Spelling Expert’s errors and say, “that’s not true,” what I mean is, “that’s not true.” I do not mean, “Boy, are you an idiot.” I do not mean, “I am so much smarter than you.” I do not mean, “Well, the language works differently for me than it does for you.” On the contrary, what I mean is this: “What you’ve said about the language is wrong. It’s false. It is not okay to continue teaching this error to people as though it were correct.”

More importantly, I also mean this: “The writing system makes sense. Beautiful, orderly, astonishing sense. Let me show you! We can have a common understanding, and we can make that understanding available to others, to be jointly held by all who study the written English word.”

Maybe it sounds mean, but I really don’t think so.

My intent — what I mean to do — is to continue to share the facts of English orthography and a deep understanding of them with others, to make these things commonly available, by all means.

News Brief

LEX readers who are on Facebook are invited to subscribe to LEX’s new Facebook page. While I know that not everyone avails themselves of the baleful benefits of social networking, those who do can “like” the page and enjoy frequent, brief posts. Longer articles and announcements will be reserved for this forum.

Speaking of forum, it has some very interesting relatives, which is part of today’s Facebook post. I’m just trying this out for a bit, and I may post in both places. Your comments are welcome, even if they’re contrary.

LEX Seeing the Sense in Spelling Seminar Page 2

LEX Seeing the Sense in Spelling Seminar Page 1

This summer I’ll be offering a 2-day seminar in Cincinnati. There’s probably a more elegant way to do this, but in the meantime, interested parties can have a look at this post and the next for information and a registration form.

A Sound Understanding

Recently, on a listserv for professionals interested in spelling, some participants were bothered by my suggestion that Reading “Science” gets some things deeply wrong about language. Some participants argued for the “value” of telling children “little white lies” about language, and for the common phonocentric understanding of English orthography that reduces it to little more than a flawed representation of sound.

While the listserv participants don’t hesitate to call on “linguistic information” and “facts” in their own posts, some of them objected to my efforts to do the same. And since my understanding of the linguistic facts of English orthography posed a bit of a threat to the commercial interests of the listserv moderator, she removed me from the list with no personal comment, but the following public one:

“Students learn best when taught in a manner consistent with the way the brain processes and organizes linguistic information information. Consider this…the system which is biologically hard-wired is perfect (the phonemes of language are a constant); the artificial system of written language which was created by humans…not so much.”

Another participant concurred: “The fact that different dialects of English vary in their surface representations of those constant phonemes does not diminish the perfection!”

My broader conversations about these claims about the perfection of phonemes sparked the interest of my fellow University of Chicago alum, Dr. Alexander Francis, who is associate professor in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at Purdue University, a Program Faculty member in Linguistics, and holds a courtesy appointment in Psychological Sciences. In other words, Dr. Francis is a bona fide expert in “the way the brain processes and organizes linguistic information” — particularly sound.

Lucky me!

So, in the interest of LEX’s stated purpose of providing a meaningful exchange between linguistics and education, I am delighted to depart briefly from my orthographic investigations to offer this first guest post, in which Dr. Francis addresses the above perspectives about phonology and the brain that pervade the field of Reading (and Spelling) “Science”.

Gina, the claim that “the system which is biologically hard-wired is perfect (the phonemes of language are a constant)” makes sense from the perspective of early theories of speech perception. However, these older theories have been almost completely replaced on the basis of a wide variety of new evidence about how infants learn their first language, and how adults learn and/or recognize the sounds of languages beyond their first one. In fact, our understanding of the human capability for speech has changed so radically in the past 30 or 40 years that, by now, most speech researchers would probably consider every part of the statement to be completely false.

Here, I’ll go through each part of the statement, and discuss (in very broad terms) evidence that suggests that it is false. I’ll also try to name some of the key researchers who have contributed to the literature in each area. And, in keeping with the idea that this is an Exchange, I’d be happy to respond to questions and/or requests for more information from you or anyone reading this.

First, the perception and production of speech sounds are not biologically hard-wired. Human infants develop language-specific perceptual abilities in the first few months of life but, at birth, infants seem to be “pluripotent” – capable of learning the sounds of any, or every, language they might be exposed to (see, especially, work by Pat Kuhl, Janet Werker, Linda Polka, Amanda Seidl, Peter Jusczyk, and many, many others). It is quite likely (though not universally accepted and not yet scientifically proven) that human infants are biologically predisposed to learn human speech, but there is no biological predisposition to learn e.g. English as opposed to, for example, !Kung (with its 5 different places of click articulation!). A child born of English-speaking parents but raised in an !Kung environment would grow up to become a perfectly fluent !Kung speaker, and vice versa. So, there’s no hardwiring of speech sounds – they‘re acquired through exposure to the ambient language(s) during infancy.

There is some evidence that long-term exposure to the use of specific acoustic properties in a linguistically relevant manner may have measurable effects on brain organization – my colleagues Ravi Krishnan and Jack Gandour have (with their students) shown that native speakers of Chinese, which is a tonal language, process the acoustic property of fundamental frequency, related to the perception of pitch, in a more accurate manner than do monolingual native speakers of English. But this is a very subtle effect, and it’s not clear whether we might not see the same kind of thing in other kinds of experienced listeners, for example musicians (see work by Patrick Wong, Nina Kraus, Aniruddh Patel, Robert Zatorre, and many others). In other words, there may be some development of “firmware” through auditory experience, but it’s not clear yet to what degree this is a purely linguistic phenomenon.

More importantly, even though there may be some possibly permanent changes in neurophysiology as a consequence of early language experience, the adult brain remains remarkably plastic – able to adapt in response to linguistic input. This plasticity plays out in a variety of ways. Multilinguality is by far the dominant pattern of language use among humans, and the ability to switch between one language, with one system of sounds and sound-meaning correspondences, and another (often within a single sentence, in the case of “code mixing”) is probably fundamental to human speech . Indeed, recent research (by Lori Holt and colleagues, among others) is starting to show that even monolingual listeners can adapt the way they use the speech signal over the course of just a few seconds. Work by Howard Nusbaum and colleagues (including some work in my lab) has shown that longer-term changes (i.e. lasting over 6 months) in the way listeners understand speech sounds can be introduced with just a few hours of exposure to a new talker. Thus, many modern speech scientists conceptualize phonemes as the output of a highly flexible, cognitive system involving both bottom-up (signal-dependent) and top-down (knowledge-based) processing. There are certainly researchers who emphasize the bottom-up aspect of the process more than do others, but nearly everyone agrees that adult phoneme recognition is flexible and manifestly *not* hardwired. (Reference: Kluender, K. R., and Alexander, J. M. (2007). “Perception of speech sounds,” in P. Dallos and D. Oertel (Eds.) Handbook of the Senses: Audition (Elsevier: London).

Second, under normal circumstances, phoneme recognition is not perfect. Speech is often produced in contexts of background noise including the presence of competing speech (the so-called “cocktail party problem”) and our perceptual/cognitive system learns, over many years, to cope with the kind of variability, ambiguity, distortion, and simple lack of sufficient acoustic information, introduced by these problems. Listeners *constantly* make “slips of the ear” which are then typically corrected by higher-level understanding (though, again, this correction is not always perfect). This is especially true under poor listening conditions, such as in the presence of background noise, but it happens even under perfect listening conditions as well. For example, consider the famous phrase “How to wreck a nice beach.” (say it out loud – in a casual way). If you heard this while looking a picture of a huge bulldozer pushing piles of sand around, or perhaps a picture of a row of tacky beach houses, you might assume that you heard it correctly (as written). But if you heard the exact same sequence of sounds in a lecture on speech technology, you would almost certainly interpret it as the phrase “how to recognize speech.” Ambiguous sound sequences abound, in every language, and are the source of some of our greatest anecdotes and humor: “Why did the three brothers name the cattle ranch they inherited from their father ‘Focus’? Because that’s where the sons raise meat.” (Think about it). [Editor's note: These phrasal phenomena are called holorimes.]

Sound ambiguities are, of course, also the source of frequent, frustrating confusion that should be familiar to everyone. But, again, our brains are very good (but not perfect) at compensating. The next time you speak with someone on a cell phone, try replacing all the “th” sounds (as in “think“ and “thank you“ etc.) with [f] (i.e. say “fank you very much.”) They won‘t be able to hear the difference, because the cell phone simply doesn‘t transmit the frequencies that distinguish a [θ] from a [f]. But they will *think* that they hear a [θ] – it’s not that they think “I don’t know what that sound is, so I’ll guess.“ They actually *hear* the correct sound. Some researchers have even proposed that this is a kind of hallucination, though I don’t know of any evidence that would prove that. The fact is, our auditory system simply cannot depend on the speech signal to be unambiguous – In fluent speech, words are almost invariably distorted by their context such that, when heard in isolation, they are significantly less recognizable than when heard in context (this was first shown in the 1950s by George Miller and colleagues). But this is not a result of errors, or sloppiness – this is an unavoidable consequence of the biology and physics of speech production, in a phenomenon called “coarticulation.“ It is nearly impossible, and demonstrably detrimental to communication, to try to pronounce every sound of every word in a sentence as it would be produced in isolation. So adult listeners have very sophisticated mechanisms for deciphering ambiguous sounds, but it‘s definitely not perfect – in fact, it can be tricked quite easily.

In a well-known phenomenon called the “Ganong Effect” (named for W.F. Ganong who first wrote about it), a speech sounds that is intentionally ambiguous between [t] and [d] can be shown to be heard more often as a [t] when followed by “-ask” (where hearing it as a [t] creates the English word “task”), while the exact same sound is heard more often as a [d] when followed by “-ash” (when hearing it as a [d] creates the English word “dash.”) In other words, listeners’ brains make up for the ambiguity by making the relatively reasonable assumption that they are hearing a real word from their language (i.e. “task” or “dash”) rather than some made up word (i.e. “dask” or “tash.) There is nothing perfect about hearing (or producing) phonemes – it is accomplished by a very sophisticated mechanism that is no less complex, and no less dependent upon experience and cognitive processing, than that involved in reading.

Finally, the phonemes of a language are by no means constant. Obviously there are historical changes (such as the one that turned some, but not all “oo“ words from having the vowel [u] (as in “food“) to having the vowel [ʊ] (as in “hood“ or “good“)), but even if we simply consider the language as it’s spoken at this precise moment in time, there is considerable variability across dialects (consider the different phonemes in a southern American English production of the word “fire” (more like “fahr”) vs. a Midwestern pronunciation. But, even within speakers of a single dialect, it’s not even clear whether the mental representations of speech sounds (i.e. the phonemes) that are used by one listener are the same as those used by another listener. Research in the past 20-30 years has shown that speech perception is highly influenced by experience, not just experience in infancy, but also subsequently. One of the currently dominant theories of speech perception, Exemplar Theory, proposes that every individual exemplar of a speech sound that is ever heard contributes to the unique representation of that sound in the brain of that specific listener (see work by David Pisoni, Keith Johnson, and colleagues). There is a nice analogy to word meanings: When I hear the word “dog” it evokes, among many other things, the image of my own dog. Presumably, as you have never met my dog, it does not evoke that same image for you. Your concept of the meaning of “dog” is subtly, but fundamentally, different from mine, by virtue of the differences in our respective experiences with dogs. In the same way, according to this theory, my best friend growing up, a guy who watched a lot of Monty Python, probably has a very different conceptualization of the sound [r], because he‘s heard British (r-less) pronunciations much more often than I have. Again, the distinction is probably quite subtle, but studies by David Pisoni, Lynne Nygaard and colleagues have shown that listeners are better at recognizing a word that they‘ve heard before if it‘s spoken by the same person as they heard it from previously – the sounds of that word are subtly different for that listener simply by virtue of having heard that person say it before. Thus, the phonemes of a language are not only not constant over time, they are not really constant across different speakers of the same language.

I don’t know if this really gets at what you’re working on with respect to spelling, but, in general, I guess I’d say it doesn’t really help to think of speech perception (or production) as a model of a flawless system. Because it’s not. It’s pretty amazing, but it’s not by any means perfect.

Simply Put: Part II

As my last post went up and was seen by the world of LEX readers, I was excited to see 120 hits in a day. That seemed like a lot of people. But compared to the American Educator‘s maelstrom of 900,000 readers, my little blog isn’t even a bathtub eddy. The journal of the American Federation of Teachers, which published the article I critiqued last time, regularly has nearly two million eyes fixed upon it. And the article in question is loaded, linked, and recommended on hundreds more Web pages.

The article has likely been read by millions of people.

Now, I’m thrilled that there’s a growing interest in spelling and spelling instruction that’s more than just memorize-and-test. I’m pleased that the article gets a lot right: English orthography concerns word structure and word histories, not just sounds. But the article is saturated with so much linguistic error that, as it’s gone fractal out there, it’s formed its own whole galaxy of teachers, tutors, speech pathologists, language therapists, curriculum developers, administrators, and others, who have a muddled understanding of how both English spelling and etymology actually work. In a world of instant access and free PDFs online, these experts’ errors have become viral juggernauts in both academia and the blogosphere. They’re scattered like feathers on the wind.

Let’s trace just one of the article’s errors — a mere typo, the one that’s easiest to trace — and see where it goes. As you know if you read Simply Put: Part I, the article in question begins with the following sentence:

In 1773, Noah Webster stated that “spelling is the foundation of reading and the greatest ornament of writing.”

But, as my students and I learned, Webster was born in 1758, and would only have been 14 or 15 in 1773. In fact, in 1773, the young Noah was studying Greek and Latin with a Hartford pastor, in preparation for his entry into Yale the following year. So where did the article’s authors get their bad information? They give the citation in the following endnote:

Cited in Richard L. Venezky, “From Webster to Rice to Roosevelt,” in Cognitive Processes in Spelling, ed. Uta Firth (London: Academic Press, 1980), 9-30.

Okay, so the Great Big Spelling Expert authors cite Venezky, who cited Webster. When I check the Venezky source cited, however, I find this:

So Venezky got it right. Since the late linguist counted a copy of the 1783 text in his personal collection (donated to Stanford), it looks like he actually consulted the original. Venezky also cites, in the same article, another pearl of wisdom from the pen of Mr. Webster, but references it as “Webster, 1783/1968, p. 11.”  This refers, of course, to a 1968 reprint of the original 1783 work. But it’s clear from his bibliography that the two sources are one and the same.

So, an eighteenth-century lexicographer / grammarian writes something down, an opinion, really, a characterization. Not a stone-cold fact or a first-time discovery, but an argument. He gets cited by some linguist just under 200 years later, in the late twentieth century. Then the twentieth-century linguist gets cited 20-some years later, in the twenty-first century, but incorrectly. (It’s all so exciting! Literally!)

Then what happens?

Then the error is reproduced and gets a foothold in print and digital media, in scholarly works and casual websites alike. Now, clearly the twenty-first century Spelling Experts simply executed a typo, and no one — not them, not their preliminary readers, not the journal’s editors — no one thought to double-check the date, or the original source, a citation re-cited, before sending it to press. No big deal, right? Typos happen all the time. They’re not actually real errors, just a simple mistake.

Mmm, maybe not.

The spelling article was originally published in American Educator in late 2008. Since then, in just three years, it’s been made freely available not only on American Educator‘s website, but also on literally hundreds of others, including several outside the U.S. In addition to the 900,000-strong readership of the journal, the freestanding article itself has easily seen hundreds of thousands — possibly millions — more readers. And those readers have shared the article’s content uncritically with others: colleagues, college students, parents, and children.

This one single 1773 error alone is far more easily locatable than all the linguistic misapprehensions, and I found it in several diverse places:

*on this blog, which was reposted here

*in this professional association newsletter (Spring 2009)

*in this dissertation (A)

*in this dissertation (B) too

*in this book on cognitive abilities in older adults, and even

*in Estonian, on this website, whence Google will re-translate the quotation back into a garbled “spelling is based on reading and writing, the largest piece of jewelry.” Ha!

So the error’s got traction.

Interestingly enough, the “ornament of writing” quotation doesn’t appear in every edition of Webster’s speller — over more than a century, this enormously popular book has come out in multiple editions — over a hundred in Webster’s lifetime alone. But not all of them have that line. Take, for example, the 1793 edition, which is digitized here. Within just 10 years, that line had disappeared from the speller. Known over time by different names, Webster’s text was hugely popular, at one point the best-selling book in all of North America. It was originally published in 1783 (not 1773) as the first volume of A Grammatical Institute of the English Language (the other two volumes were a grammar and a reader, respectively), and changed names over time, including The American Spelling Book and The Elementary Spelling Book, but best known as the Blue-Backed Speller (I’ve also seen Blue Back Speller in several searches). In its multiple editions and reprints over more than a century, the speller included a variety of prefaces, introductions, commentaries, advertisements, and testimonials.

The “foundation of reading” quotation does not appear in the 1807 edition of the book, then called The American Spelling Book. But that doesn’t stop one of the Spelling Expert authors from citing it indirectly in a 2005 article, where he attributes the quotation to Webster “as early as 1807.” While it’s not a lie — I mean, clearly Webster did say it as early as that — why not just get the citation right and check an original source? Didn’t we all learn in college to check original sources whenever possible? The Interwebs were around by 2005 — it wouldn’t have taken long to figure out when and where Webster wrote this oh-so-beloved quotation. Since the author offers no citation reference for this “as early as” information, however, it’s impossible to tell why he picked that particular year. It betrays a scholarship that thinks Webster is important enough to quote, but not to actually study.

Webster was, in fact, one interesting guy, as we might expect. As a child, he received his education largely from his mother; he found his one-room schoolhouse teachers to be pious and illiterate dullards, and his adult desire was to see well-trained teachers in every American classroom. In fact, he himself wrote of his speller that its rules and guidelines “are rather designed for the master [teacher] than for the scholar [student]; for if all instructors pronounced words with correctness and uniformity, there would be little danger that their pupils would acquire vicious habits of pronunciation” (found in an early nineteenth-century edition, digitized here). While I don’t get too moved by Webster’s orthoepy or syllable division or his fairly narrow focus on a single American English, I can get down with the idea of well-trained teachers, hence my complaints about shoddy scholarship in education journals and elsewhere. Indeed, if all instructors — or all Spelling Experts — approached word structures and histories with correctness and discipline, there would be little danger that their pupils would acquire vicious habits of scholarship.

Now wait just a minute. Aren’t those awfully strong words, for just a typo? Shoddy? Vicious habits? Shouldn’t I just gear down?

Well, let’s take a closer look at the sources that pass along the 1773 error. Doing so myself convinced me even further of the need for improved rigor in spelling scholarship. When scholars simply cite, cite, cite, rather than to seek evidence themselves (I already wrote about that here), they’re also likely to blindly trust that what they cite must be correct, without questioning, interrogating, or verifying their sources’ claims. Folks just really trust these Spelling Experts, and they’ll take what they say without checking it further. This blog didn’t give any source for the faulty citation until I asked for one; while it claims to be a “linguistic” site, and refers to linguistics as the “scientific study” of language, the blog itself is decidedly casual. That’s to be expected in the world of weblogs, I suppose.

So let’s go to the other end of things. In a book chock-full of facts, figures, and statistics, a book claiming to “focus on research foundations,” a book published by Springer Science and Business Media, the authors of Chapter 10 trot out the erroneous 1773 claim, and don’t offer any citation for it. When we read their text, we’re just supposed to take their word that Webster said what he said, but in 1773. Written, then cited, then cited again, then cited again, and with each citation, it moves further away from its source, further away from real scholarship. These authors do cite the Spelling Experts’ article a couple of sentences later, so I can be certain that’s where they got the error.

Let’s also consider how the two doctoral dissertations cite Webster, just for kicks. As a doctoral student myself, I know how hard doctoral students work. I know how much detail goes into preparing a dissertation, including gathering appropriate copyright information, cross-referencing works cited, and dotting <i>s and crossing <t>s, so I was (am) troubled to see these two dissertations show evidence of some scholarly sloppiness.

In the first dissertation, the author (A) attributes the Webster quotation thusly:

In 1773, Noah Webster suggested that “spelling is the foundation of reading and the greatest ornament of writing” (cited in Venezky, 1989, p. 12).

She also mentions Venezky 1989 in the very first sentence of her abstract. When I check her bibliography, however, the only Venezky publication listed is Venezky, R.L. (1999), The American way of spelling: The structure and origins of American English orthography. New York: Guilford. Sigh. I check my copy of Venezky 1999 for the Webster quotation, and it’s not in there, on page 12 or anywhere else. What is in there, however, is a four-page biography of Noah Webster, including his 1758 birthdate and his 1783 publication of A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, Part I. In fact, reading Venezky was the reason my students had an inkling that 1773 was off.

I also checked to see what Venezky had published in 1989. He doesn’t refer to any 1989 work in his own bibliography, and the only thing I could find that Venezky authored solo and published in 1989 was a book review that was published on pages 89-92 of the American Journal of Education. While I don’t have a copy of that source to see if the quotation is in it or not, I can tell that it has no page 12. Ultimately, I’ll never know where the dissertation’s author got that citation. Fortunately, dissertations are not known for being widely read. Perhaps the erroneous buck will stop here.

But there are a few other bucks out there. The second dissertation (B) has its own citation problems. In a totally undergrad-level move, the author closely paraphrases the Spelling Experts’ article. Here’s what the article’s first paragraph says:

In 1773, Noah Webster stated that “spelling is the foundation of reading and the greatest ornament of writing.” He was right. Good spelling is critical for literacy, and it makes writing much easier. . . [S]pelling instruction underpins reading success . . . As children learn to spell, their knowledge of words improves and reading becomes easier.

And the dissertation’s first paragraph says this (with most of the sources removed to make the reading easier):

In 1773, Noah Webster correctly suggested that “spelling is the foundation of reading and the greatest ornament of writing” (cited in Venezky, 2000). Good spelling ability is critical to the reading process, as is reading to spelling. . . As children’s knowledge of spelling increases, their knowledge of words improves; thus, reading and writing become not only easier but interconnected (Joshi, Treiman, Carreker, & Moats, 2009).

Now, while this dissertation does cite the Spelling Experts, she doesn’t credit them with the Webster quotation; rather, she credits that to Venezky 2000.  So I check her bibliography, and I find Venezky 1993, which she also cites in the text, and Venezky, R. L. (2000). The American way of spelling: The structure and origins of American English orthography. New York: Guilford Press. But the book has just one publication date, and it’s 1999, not 2000. Double sigh. Venezky did publish an article in 2000 (“The Origins of the Present-Day Chasm Between Adult Literacy Needs and School Literacy Instruction” in Scientific Studies of Reading, Vol. 4, Issue 1), but the Webster quotation doesn’t make an appearance. Webster is mentioned in it, however: “Noah Webster published his first speller in 1783″ (24); once again, Venezky gets it right.

One of my students noted that the Spelling Experts claimed a collective “eight decades of experience helping preservice and inservice teachers improve their instruction in spelling, reading, and writing” (page 6). “You’d think,” said my student, “that in 80 years they would’ve had plenty of time to check their facts.” We all had a good chuckle, and I had to admit that my student had come by his spelling snark honestly.

As I detailed in my last post, I tried to guide my students toward epistemological rigor and accuracy. This experience made the reasons behind my nagging crystal clear. The point is never the snark: it’s the call to a higher standard for scholarship in the field. These authors are prolific, and have their hand in published spelling curricula, as well as the “research” base it relies on. I’ve written about other linguistic errors in some of their other writings, too. One of them says in that same 2005 article that <hear> is the base element of <rehearsal>; it isn’t — it’s <hearse>, like the funeral car, and here’s the proof. Another says in this book that <tube> is Anglo-Saxon. Nope and nope. I could go on. And I probably will.

As I’ve done a little research for my dissertation into Noah Webster’s work, I realize how much it has permeated literacy instruction in the U.S., for better and for worse. The fixation on syllable division, the focus on word lists, the assumption that pronunciation is the goal of orthography, the notion that there is a single American Standard English, and even that persistent and careless assertion that <tion> is a suffix, which it’s not (if you’re not convinced, here’s a proof, in the comments) — all these are traceable to the perseverance of Webster’s works in American classrooms. Popular publications — publications that get widely circulated and used over and over again — become part of the common knowledge out there.

This is why I care about the errors in the Spelling Experts’ article. It’s so widely read. It’s been posted and reposted, passed along, and it is still frequently and proudly cited, including by the authors themselves. Now, arguably, no one’s going to suffer too much from seeing the wrong date on a Noah Webster quotation; it’s unlikely to destroy someone’s conceptual foundations about language, history, spelling, and writing. It’s not evidence of anything except one famous man’s opinion. But if an innocuous error like getting a date wrong can have such far-reaching consequences in both scholarship and popular culture, what about the conceptual errors, like assuming that all short, common words are from Old English (gym class, anyone?), or assuming that all words from Latin are “sophisticated” (cup or pen, anyone?), or modeling etymology as something that can be guessed at? What are the effects of the wide dissemination of historical and linguistic error? I can’t help but wonder how far that article — and its errors — will reach a hundred years hence.

Time to get my readership numbers up!

Simply Put: Part I

This past fall, I attended the annual conference of the International Dyslexia Association (IDA), as I have nearly every fall for the past dozen years. I was astounded and delighted by the number of sessions — including two of my own — dedicated to spelling and/or morphology.

Along with some colleagues, I attended a day-long symposium on spelling on the first day of the conference, entitled “Spelling: Development, Assessment, and Instruction.” In order to attend the conference, I had canceled one day of the college course I was teaching in English orthography, but I had assigned my students an article co-authored in 2008 by three of the symposium’s five panelists and a fourth author. I had asked my college students to prepare notes on the article for our class that would reconvene the Monday after the conference. That article was referred to several times during the symposium, and I was eager to see what my students would learn and discover in their own readings.

This post details what my class and I learned that week.

My colleagues and I greatly enjoyed the symposium overall, and I was eager to go back and tell my students what I had heard. The panelists, widely known as the best spelling researchers Science-Based Reading has to offer, urged the inclusion of morphology and etymology in any consideration of English orthography as critical. I was pleased to see the discussion move beyond the phonology that is typically the primary consideration in literacy instruction circles. But perhaps my favorite part was when one panelist told a story from her own past, referring to herself as a then “hot-blooded grad student.” She then encouraged the “hot-blooded grad students” in the audience to speak up, because they (we) often have perspectives that the field needs to hear.

This post details a few things that this “hot-blooded grad student” thinks the broader field needs to hear.

First, I was dismayed that the day’s last panelist, a writing instruction researcher, repeatedly referred to spelling as a “lower-level skill,” as though it were the linguistic equivalent of learning to eat with a fork. This panelist was especially disappointing after her colleagues and an audience of several hundred had spent the previous five hours exploring the ways in which English spelling is rich, structured, and captivating — the antithesis of both “lower-level” and a mere single “skill.” Moreover, for a researcher that spent 90 minutes presenting quantitative data, research statistics, effect sizes, and other very important sciencey things, she sure felt comfortable presenting spelling as a “lower-level skill” without offering one ounce of evidence in support of such a characterization. I appreciated having the opportunity to address this gross misrepresentation during the Q&A session, and I encourage IDA, its panelists, and its audience to pay careful attention to the kinds of false messages that even reading scientists promote about spelling.

This post details some of those controvertible messages about spelling.

Second, after the session, I approached one panelist to address a statement he made regarding the suffixes <able> and <ible>. During the Q&A, he had claimed that “we add <ible> to Latin roots, and <able> to Anglo‐Saxon [Old English] base words like readable and passable.” This is not an uncommon assertion, and one that I heard more than once at the IDA conference; it is one of those messages that gets repeatedly repeated over and over again and again in spite of running counter to the evidence. In fact, I had also previously encountered it in the article authored by some of these panelists that I had assigned to my class. Here’s how I wrote about this encounter with this panelist for a seminar paper on orthographic fact and affect:

While I had previously encountered and critiqued this line of thinking in their article, I had by no means intended to raise it in their conference session. However, because the Spelling Expert himself reiterated the faulty claim — and because his co-panelist had thrown down the gauntlet to the hot‐blooded grad students (HBGSs) in the audience — I girded myself for orthographic battle. My heart raced as I approached the podium where the Expert still stood, gathering his papers. My face felt hot. I approached him and introduced myself, including my HBGS status. I showed him where I had jotted down his claim about readable and passable, and informed him straightforwardly that passable is neither Anglo nor Saxon, but French.

“Well, life is full of exceptions,” he quipped, spelling expertise intact.

“Be that as it may,” I answered, “the writing system is not. Let me show you.” I proceeded to explain that the <navig> in navigable is Latin, as is the <punish> in punishable that he cites in his article. In fact, I explained, the suffixes <able> and <ible> are themselves Latin, and didn’t exist in Old English. They are variant spellings of the same suffix, and as such, could not possibly have different languages of origin.

“Well,” he intoned as though to a novice, “we work with very young children, and it’s a very simple thing to teach them that when you take off the /әbl/ and you have a whole word, it will be spelled <able>.” He held firm to his ideologic, solidly confident in his Spelling Expertise. Apparently, according to this ideologic, very young children need what’s simple, regardless of whether it’s accurate. Here, the rhetoric of spelling as “simple,” basic, and elementary surfaces again.

“So if <able> is always added to a whole word, how do you explain sensible and responsible?” I asked. “Those both have <ible>, but their stems are whole, freestanding words.”

“I’d have to check,” he said, “but I think those are Latin.” While my heart was no longer pounding, my skin seemed to prickle with the eagerness of fact.

“They are Latin,” I reassured him. “But so are navigable and punishable. You can look them up.” It was at this point that I saw this Spelling Expert become destabilized. He was speechless. He didn’t move toward or away from me; he made no move to end the conversation. But he didn’t know what to say. He no longer had a response. I had finally succeeded in interjecting factual evidence in between him and his belief system.

I then suggested to the panelist that it’s really not acceptable to teach children things that are demonstrably false, regardless of how simple the things and how young the children. I also told him that I was teaching a university class on English orthography, in which my students has been assigned the article he had co-authored for our class on the Monday following the conference. Since these panelist-authors collectively make the same claim about <able> and <ible> in the article, I told this panelist that I had asked my students to read the article critically, and that I would share their discoveries and comments after our course ended. He indicated that he would be amenable to receiving their feedback.

This post details my students’ feedback on the article.

1. The article claims: “In 1773, Noah Webster stated that ‘spelling is the foundation of reading and the greatest ornament of writing.”

Student response: “Noah Webster was born in 1758. Was he really only 15 when he said that?”

What we learned: Noah Webster was indeed born in 1758, and he published the first volume of A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, whence this quotation, in 1783, at the age of 25. This first volume later became widely known — and used — as the “Blue-Backed Speller,” and it was the most common literacy textbook in American elementary schools for about 100 years.

This error has gained weird traction in both academia and the blogosphere, but I’ll deal with that in a separate post.

2. The article claims: “For example, ch pronounced as /ch/, as in chair or chief, appears in Anglo-Saxon or Old English words; the same letter combination ch pronounced as /sh/, as in chef and chauffeur, appears in French words of Latin origin; and ch pronounced as /k/, as in ache and orchid, appears in words borrowed from Greek.

My students’ response: “The words chair and chief are both Latinate, and entered English from Old French during the Middle English period.”

Also: “The word ache is from Old English, not Greek.”

What we learned: Present-day English words with <ch> pronounced as /ʧ/ (or, as the panelists say, /ch/) are more often French than they are Old English. Not only are chair and chief French; they derive from the same roots as chaise and chef respectively. Other French-origin words include chain, chance, change, channel, chant, chapel, chapter, charge, cheat, cheer, cherish, cherry, chess, chimney, chive, chock, choice, chowder, and chuck. Also Latinate-and-not-Old-English: ranch, blanch, cinch, launch, staunch, flinch, poncho, munch, peach, preach, and roach. Many other words with <ch> as /ʧ/ that are not Latinate also did not exist in Old English, and cannot be correctly called “Anglo-Saxon,” such as chub, chuckle, chat, chomp, chop, chap, and many others. There is so very much counter-evidence to this unfounded claim!

Also: Yes, ache is Old English (from acan), not Greek. It was respelled in the eighteenth century, because of folk etymology relating it to Greek akhos, ‘pain’. Just because an error is old doesn’t mean it’s not an error.

3. The article claims that homophonic suffixes (<er>, <or> and <able> <ible>) can be spelled according to the origin of their base or stem, as I saw at the IDA conference. The authors’ published commentary on <able> and <ible> appears at the end of this paragraph about halfway through the article:

Teaching morphemes often requires more information on word origin. For example, when teaching the spellings of words with the suffixes er and or, which mean one who, as in worker or actor, teachers can tell their students that words from Old English are basic survival words. Words such as worker, carpenter, farmer, grocer, baker, brewer, and butcher are Old English and use er, whereas words of Latin origin are more sophisticated and use or, as in actor, professor, educator, aviator, director, and counselor. The same principle applies to the suffxes able and ible, both meaning able to. We use able for Old English base words and ible for Latin roots. Thus, we have passable, laughable, breakable, agreeable, and punishable, as compared to edible, audible, credible, visible, and indelible.

Student responses:

“How does a young student differentiate between “common, every day, survival” words and “sophisticated” words?”

“The suffix <able> is found not only on Anglo-Saxon words, but also Old French and Latin.”

“If –able and –ible are variants of the same suffix, why would we assume that they have different origins?”

“Several of the words listed as Old English in fact have French roots that trace back to Latin: farmer, grocer, passable, punishable, and butcher.”

“Three wrong out of five would be an F.”

And a whole lot more.

What we learned: While it is evident that the <ible> spelling surfaces exclusively in Latinate words, it is categorically untrue that it surfaces in all Latinate words, and thus equally false that <able> occurs only in words of Old English origin. In fact, of the five <able> examples given in the article, three of them — passable, agreeable, and punishable are from Latin. Likewise, of the seven words with <er> listed as Anglo-Saxon, four are from Latin: carpenter, farmer, grocer, and butcher.

Moreover, the suffixes <able> and <ible> don’t mean ‘able to’ at all. Something that is laughable is not ‘able to laugh.’ Something that is sensible is not ‘able to sense.’ Rather, these words mean ‘worthy of laughter’ or ‘having the quality of sense.’ A taxable item is ‘subject to tax’, not ‘able to tax.’ A fashionable outfit is ‘in accordance with fashion,’ not ‘able to fashion.’ In fact, not only do the suffixes <able> and <ible> have a different orthographic denotation than the adjective able, but they also have a totally different origin. Here’s what my Mactionary says:

able |ˈābəl|

adjective ( abler , ablest )

1 [with infinitive ] having the power, skill, means, or opportunity to do something : he was able to read Greek at the age of eight | he would never be able to afford such a big house.

2 having considerable skill, proficiency, or intelligence : the dancers were technically very able.

ORIGIN late Middle English (also in the sense [easy to use, suitable] ): from Old French hable, from Latin habilis ‘handy,’ from habere ‘to hold.’

-able |əbəl| |əb(ə)l|

suffix forming adjectives meaning:

1 able to be : calculable.

2 due to be : payable.

3 subject to : taxable.

4 relevant to or in accordance with : fashionable.

5 having the quality to : suitable | comfortable.

ORIGIN from French -able or Latin -abilis, adjectival endings; originally found in words only from these forms but later used to form adjectives directly from English verbs ending in -ate, e.g., educable from educate. The unrelated able has probably influenced terms such as bearable, salable.

The Mactionary has no entry for the suffix <ible>. Tsk tsk.

And from Etymonline:

able: early 14c., from O.Fr. (h)able (14c.), from L. habilem, habilis “easily handled, apt,” verbal adj. from habere “to hold” (see habit). “Easy to be held,” hence “fit for a purpose.” The silent h- was dropped in English and resisted academic attempts to restore it 16c.-17c., but some derivatives acquired it (e.g. habiliment, habilitate), via French.

-able: suffix expressing ability, capacity, fitness, from French, from L. -ibilis, -abilis, forming adjectives from verbs, from PIE *-tro-, a suffix used to form nouns of instrument. In Latin, infinitives in -are took -abilis, others -ibilis; in English, -able is used for native words, -ible for words of obvious Latin origin. The Latin suffix is not etymologically connected with able, but it long has been popularly associated with it, and this has contributed to its survival as a living suffix.

-ible: suffix forming adjectives from verbs, borrowed in M.E. from O.Fr. -ible and directly from L. -ibilis; see -able.

Okay, so the symposium panelists / authors are not the first to associate the suffix <able> with the adjectival free base <able>, but precedent is not the same thing as rectitude.

4. The article uses several words throughout its 13 pages that bear the suffix <able> or the related <ably>. We decided to check them against the authors’ own assertions. These words’ word origins checked in multiple etymology sources via Memidex, and verified by my own knowledge of French:

variable: First clue: bases that start with a <v> are almost always Latinate, or at least passed through French on their way into English. This one is from Latin variabilis, from variare, ‘to change, to vary’, via French variable.

predictable: I can tell this is isn’t Anglo-Saxon from looking at it: the <ct> is a dead give-away. Words with <ct> are either from Latin or Greek. This one is a Thoroughly Modern Millie, first attested in the 19th century, but has Latin roots, though, from prae ‘before’ and dicere ‘to say.’

undesirable: A modern etymological hybrid (17th century) from Old English <un> plus desirable from Old French desirable, ultimately from Latin desiderare — a gorgeous word related to consider and sidereal that refers to reaching for the stars.

manageable: Again, if you know what to look for, you know this is Latinate. The <age> suffix is from French, and the bound base <mane> I recognize from the Latin manus, ‘hand,’ also seen in manipulate, manifest, manufacture, and manure. But I check my hunches before I publish them, and I was surprised to find that this didn’t enter English via French, but probably via the Italian maneggiare ‘to handle.’ The Online Etymology Dictionary tells us that it meant “especially ‘to control a horse,’” and was likely “influenced by French manège ‘horsemanship’.” This and other sources confirm that it’s traceable to Latin manus. See that? Latin. Neither Anglo nor Saxon.

available: The word avail was formed in Middle English from Old French parts, and the <able> was added a couple centuries later. The <a> is a prefix meaning ‘to, toward,’ and the <vail> is a free base (probably aphetic — look it up) meaning ‘benefit, bring worth.’ It’s also found in prevail and in one of my favorite words: countervailing, and is related to the bound base <vale> as seen in value, evaluate, valiant, valor, valence, valid, and convalesce, all Latinate, of course.

damageable: There’s that <age> again. Anyone who ever took French 100 learned C’est dommage, a cognate. It’s from Old French, and is cousin to the Latinate damn, condemn, and indemnity.

knowledgeable: The <kn> digraph betrays this one as having the only truly Old English base. The stem <knowledge> derives from the Middle English knowleche, whose base <know> is traceable to the Old English cnāwan. Our modern <know> counts ken, uncanny, and can among its first cousins, and agnostic and recognize and many others words among its more distant cousins. I already wrote about them here.

reasonably: Middle English from French raisonable, from Latin ratio ‘reckoning, calculation, reason.’ I’m telling you, this word study stuff is my raison d’être.

reliably: The stem <rely> comes from Old French relier, which is traceable to Latin religare ‘bind, tie together.’ Interestingly, reliable took a detour through Scottish to get here. But Anglo-Saxon it’s not.

That’s right. Of these nine words, only one has an Old English stem: knowledgeable. Funny how often we come back to knowledge in these LEX posts.

5. Finally, the article claims that the following words also belong to the  “Anglo-Saxon layer” of English. They do not:

catch (from French)

peck (late Middle English)

pouch (from French)

badge (late Middle English)

fudge (early Modern English)

age (from French)

hinge (from Middle English)

scrooge (an eponym courtesy of Charles Dickens, 1843)

desk (from Latin)

peek (late Middle English)

bagged (Middle English)

cub (Modern English — 16th c)

club (Middle English meaning ‘large stick’ and Modern English meaning ‘organization’)

class (from Latin via French)

cube (from Greek, as are most words you can add an <ic> to)

found (the past tense of find derives from an Old English word, but the present-tense verb meaning ‘to establish’ is Middle English from French from Latin).

That’s a lot of mistakes.

Here’s what one of my students said about reading this article, and he nailed it:

“I love tracing a word back to its roots and checking that against claims made by experts in language. It’s not that I’m looking to show someone that they are wrong, it’s simply my feeling that if you’re not checking on your own work then somebody should. My thought [is] that experts should be working to sharpen each other by checking their claims and what someone presents as fact.” (DK)

My students also expressed more faith in very young children than the panelist. One student captured this eloquently:

“I think it is crazy that we are just now learning these things as juniors and seniors in college. Had we started learning to spell and write like this in elementary school we all could have much better understanding of the language. A lot like [my classmate], a lot of these concepts are new to me with this class. I think that this is why I am so shocked that we have never learned any of this before. It all makes so much sense and would really help learn the language if we would be taught these topics starting at a younger age than college.” (QG)

Experts are supposed to be reliable. We’re supposed to be able to trust them to tell the truth, to verify their information, and to admit when they’ve been proven wrong. Children, no matter how young, deserve to learn what’s factual, not what’s easy. Teachers deserve to read educational articles that are fact-checked. Experts, no matter how widely published or how famous in their field, need to maintain integrity and rigor in their scholarship.

It’s that simple.