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June 25, 2010

GhotiBy Ben Zimmer

The spelling ofEnglish is a bizarre mishmash, no doubt about it. Why do we

spell acclimation with an i in the middle but acclamation with an a? Why

do we distinguish betweencarat, caret, carrotand karat? For those who feel

strongly that something needs to be done, theres no better place to vent some

orthographic rage than the Scripps National Spelling Bee. The 2010 bee, held

earlier this month, was no exception, as a handful of protesters from

the American Literacy Council and the British-based Spelling Society picketedthe Grand Hyatt in Washington, while inside young spellers braved such

obscurities asparavane (an underwater mine remover) and ochidore (a shore

crab).

When talk turns to the irrationality of English spelling conventions, a five-letter

emblem of our languages foolishness inevitably surfaces:ghoti. The Christian

Science Monitor, reporting on the spelling-bee protesters, laid out the familiar

story (while casting some doubt on its veracity): The Irish playwright George

Bernard Shaw is said to have joked that the word fish could legitimately bespelled ghoti, by using the gh sound from enough, the o sound from

women and the ti sound from action.

Just one problem with the well-worn anecdote: theres not a shred of evidence

that Shaw, though a noted advocate for spelling reform, ever brought up ghoti.
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Scholars have searched high and low through Shaws writings and have never

found him suggestingghoti as a comical respelling offish.

The true origins ofghoti go back to 1855, before Shaw was even born.

In December of that year, the publisher Charles Ollier sent a letter to his goodfriend Leigh Hunt, a noted poet and literary critic. My son William has hit

upon a new method of spelling Fish, Ollier wrote. You guessed it: good

oldghoti. Little is known about William Ollier, who was 31 at the time his

father wrote the letter. According to Charles E. Robinson, a professor of English

at the University of Delaware who came across theghoti letter during research

on the Ollier family about 30 years ago, William was a journalist whose

correspondence reveals a fascination with English etymology.

As a language fancier in mid-19th-century England, William Ollier wouldsurely have come into contact with the strong current of spelling reform

championed by the likes of Isaac Pitman, now remembered for inventing a

popular system of phonetic shorthand: what Pitman called phonography. In

1845, Pitmans Phonographic Institution published A Plea for Phonotypy and

Phonography, by Alexander J. Ellis, a call to arms that laid the groundwork

forghoti and other mockeries of English spelling. To make the case for reform,

Ellis presented a number of absurd respellings, like

turningscissors intoschiesourrhce by combining parts ofSCHism, sIEve, aS,

honOUr, myRRHandsacrifiCE. (If youre wondering about the last part, the

wordsacrifice has historically had a variant pronunciation ending in the z

sound.)

Ellis thoughtscissors was a downright preposterous spelling ofsizerz, and he

went about calculating how many other ways the word could be rendered. At

first he worked out 1,745,226 spellings forscissors, then adjusted the number

upward to 58,366,440, before finally settling on a whopping 81,997,920

possibilities. Isaac Pitman and his brothers liked to use thescissorsexamplewhen proselytizing for phonetic spelling, and the 58 million number even

worked its way into Ripleys Believe It or Not!

Dont believe it. Ellis admitted that the real number would not be quite so

large, since English spelling does not actually work by stitching together parts

of words in Frankensteinian fashion. Ghoti falls down for the same reason, if
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you stop to think about it. Do we ever represent the f sound asgh at the

beginning of a word or the sh sound as ti at the end of a word? And for that

matter, is the vowel offish ever spelled with an o in any word other

than women? English spelling might be messy, but it does follow some rules.

Robinson suggested to me that William Ollier could have come up with ghoti in

a parlor game of Ellis-inspired silly spellings. Victorians often amused

themselves with genteel language games, so why not one involving the

rejiggering of common words? Into the 20th century, other jokey respellings

made the rounds, such asghoughphtheightteeau forpotato (thatsgh as

inhiccough, ough as in though, phth as inphthisis, eigh as in neigh, tte as

ingazette and eau as in beau).

Ghoti was elevated above these other spelling gags when it became attached tothe illustrious name of Shaw who, like Churchill and Twain, seems to attract

free-floating anecdotes. If Shaw never said it, who was responsible for the

attribution? I blame the philologist Mario Pei, who spread the tale in The Los

Angeles Times in 1946 and then again in his widely read 1949 book, The Story

of Language. Pei could have been confusing Shaw with another prominent

British spelling reformer, the phonetician Daniel Jones (said to be one of the

models for Shaws Henry Higgins in Pygmalion ), since Jones really did make

use of theghoti joke in a 1943 speech.

With Shaws supposed imprimatur,ghoti lingers with us. Jack Bovill, chairman

of the Spelling Society, told me that despite its jocularity,ghoti is nonetheless

useful as an example of how illogical English spelling can be. I beg to differ:

if presented withghoti, most people would simply pronounce it asgoaty. You

dont have to be a spelling-bee champ to know that written English isnt entirely

a free-for-all.

Ben Zimmer will answer one reader question every other week. Send your queries

[email protected].
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ghoti- eng spelling

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