When the finals for the National Spelling Bee were conducted in Washington, D.C., last June 4, educators in various parts of the United States took the occasion to pay tribute to the man who made that competition possible—Noah Webster, author of America’s very first dictionary of the English language and the originator of uniform spelling in America.
Among those who extolled Webster’s historic and far-reaching accomplishments in English language reform is John A. Murray, headmaster of Fourth Presbyterian School and host of the Scripps Regional Spelling Bee for Montgomery County in Maryland. In “Noah Webster and the Bee,” an article he wrote for the June 4, 2010 issue of the
Wall Street Journal, Murray recalled that Webster not only had a “passion for educating and assimilating immigrants into America” but was also a champion of American independence, one “who wanted to do away with the elitism of England’s dictionaries, which ignored the speech of common folk.”
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged (June 2002: 2,816 pages)
is the official dictionary of the National Spelling Bee in the United StatesAs one of America’s Founding Fathers, Murray says, Webster came up with a blueprint for American education that received great support from leaders such as George Washington, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin. In the 1780s, he recounts,Webster wrote the “Blue-backed Speller” and a grammar book that became standard classroom texts in the United States for over 160 years, making him the new country’s first best-selling author. On top of these achievements, Webster also produced pamphlets against slavery; wrote about politics, agriculture, and disease; created the laws for the country’s free public education system; and helped draft and pass the U.S. Constitution.
Noah WebsterAccording to Murray’s account, for decades to come, virtually every state bought large numbers of Webster’s
An American Dictionary of the English Language for its public schools. The dictionary was praised and recommended by scores of political, literary and educational luminaries, among them a U.S. Supreme Court justice, D. J. Brewer, who, in 1890, endorsed a later edition,
Webster’s International Dictionary, as “the one great standard authority,” and Mark Twain, who wrote, “This one is to me the most awe-inspiring of all Dictionaries.”
Read John A. Murray’s “Noah Webster and the Bee” in the Wall Street Journal now!Click this link to read a biography of Noah Webster and some of his major writingsRELATED READING:National Spelling Bee protests: Should we simplify English spelling?For all the richness of the English language, there has been a long line of people who think that its anarchic spelling—it is, after all, a hodgepodge of Germanic, French, Greek, and Latin—is “a complete mess” and desperately needs to be reformed. Noah Webster himself made an attempt along this line by simplifying some spelling quirks of British English, and the famous British playwright George Bernard Shaw actually willed a portion of his estate to develop a new, simpler phonetic script for English—the Shavian alphabet, which has remained ignored to this day. And during the National Spelling Bee finals in Washington, D.C., last June 4, four protesters from the American Literacy Council and the London-based Spelling Society peacefully campaigned for the simplification of English spelling, arguing that the complexity of the English language keeps 40 percent of the population from learning how to read, write and spell.
In a lighthearted article in the June 4, 2010 issue of
The Christian Science Monitor, Eoin O’Carroll of the paper’s web team ponders the possible pitfalls of such a major overhaul of English spelling. “The reezult,” he says jocularly, “would bee a langwadje that iz konsistent, lojikal, and abil too bee eezily understud by evereewon. Jorj Bernerd Sha wood bee prowd.”
Read Eoin O’Carroll’s “Should we simplify English spelling?” in the Christian Science Monitor now!
