Why I Hate Webster

I'm going to come right out and say it. Noah Webster was a hypocritical jerk. I hate him for all his efforts to improve and reform spelling and education in America. Though history extols him as the "Father of American Scholarship and Education" and describes him as being a spelling reformer who was of the belief that spelling rules for the English language were unnecessarily complex this only serves to better highlight his hypocracy. If you weren't aware Webster is also the father of the modern American dictionary (though he was not, by any means, the first to publish an American dictionary) and to this day many dictionaries bear his name (best known being the Merriam-Webster dictionary).

As any current or former American school child can tell you spelling words in 'American English' is difficult, spelling tests are a particular form of punishment teachers like to exact once per week, and 'spelling bees' are to be avoided like the plague as not only do they expect you to spell things incorrectly they expect you to do it in front of a live audience so your embarassment might provide them entertainment. Mnemonics like 'i before e except after c' and 'bears eat candy and usually spill everything' (to spell 'because') are incredibly common. And all this is after the spelling reform and standardization so successfully implemented by Webster. Aside from dropping 'u' from certain words (ex. 'color' from 'colour') I can't say that he did much to actually improve the situation in any meaningful way. I mean, standardized spelling makes sense and allows us to more easily communicate with one-another especially in the modern era of the internet, but when the standard was based on nothing but the arbitrary distinctions of one man it doesn't make a lot of sense to bother with.

In modern times we are shackled by the status quo with all our machinery that is already calibrated for the unweildy version of our language and practically dozens of people who have bothered to master the spelling of words like 'Dryaonnajaq' (a fresh water fish) but Webster had no such restrictions. In a new country lacking in dictionaries, spelling standards, teaching standards and the like he had the opportunity to really  reform spelling and unshackle it from confusion. Webster failed to do this in a spectacular way if only because he himself was the one who thought that English spelling rules were too complex. He abjectly failed to make American English any less difficult than its over-seas progenitor. Despite wanting the language to be determined by and for the people the way the government in America was by and for the people he went ahead and decided the standards for spelling and pronunciation on his own and by teaching several generations of children these new rules via his 'blue-backed spellers' he effectively mired the language in silent letters, 'soft' and 'hard' consonant sounds as well as 'long' and 'short' vowels and seemingly more exceptions to the rules than unexceptional words.

The only logical way to lay out a language and standardize it is to have one letter for each possible phoneme (each distinct sound in a language) and to have written words consist soleley of the letters necessary to make the phonemes in each spoken word. Obviously we would have to add some letters to the alphabet to do this and take an average of the current pronounciation to decide how to spell certain words. After a generation or two, however, there would be no arguing about the pronounciation of certain words because children would learn that the proper way to enunciate words is by the phoneme-based letters that make them up because there would simply be no letters that made more than one sound and no two letters that made the same sound. We would also have to determine the meaning of all homophones based on context clues but we already do this every day in spoken language so I doubt it would cause any more problems in our written language than it does verbally. We would also have to learn more letters and change our keyboards to accommodate them. Those are the downsides. The upsides are equally-obvious. It would be easy if not intuitive to know how to spell even the longest and most technically complex words and upon reading a word for the first time it would be as intuitive and easy to know how it is meant to be spoken aloud. There woud be little need for spellchecker. There would also be little competition in spelling bees and no call for spelling tests. I feel like the trade-off would be pretty reasonable, actually.

Webster did not lay out a logical language. He laid out an arbitrary one that has hindered many children and discouraged them from reaching their full potential because of its difficulty. He sought a reform that did little in the way of reforming besides anchoring our language firmly in unnecessarily complex spelling rules. He did do some worthwhile things like help to make schools secular. But the thing for which he is best-known is the very thing he seriously screwed up.