T.R. vs. the Dictionary.(Theodore Roosevelt)(Brief Article)

From boyhood, Theodore Roosevelt had been a notoriously bad spelle; so as President he simply rewrote the rules of orthography--until a swarm of spelling bees stung him back to his senses.

The Spelling Reform Association had been founded in 1886 by Melvil Dewey, a dozen years after he had immortalized himself in the nation's libraries by siring the decimal cataloging system. America's spelling reformers wanted to simplify and rationalize our lexicon, for reasons ranging from the anti-colonialist (why shackle ourselves with sense-defying British spellings?) to the ridiculously practical: Lopping off superfluous letters would shorten books and save ink and paper, claimed the champions of "simplified spelling." Moreover, American schoolchildren could shave a full two years off their studies if liberated from spelling drills.

Defenders of traditional spelling occupied the high ground of poetry and custom, while the reformers trotted out efficiency, that god of turn-of-the-century progressivism. The ensuing debate wended its way down colorful byways. The simplified spellers brandished a finding of an underemployed worker at the U.S. Pension Office, who had counted 1,690 different spellings of the word "diarrhea" in pension applications. To this, the mossback Librarian of Congress Ainsworth R. Spofford replied, "Is there any phonetic system which could bring about a uniform spelling of that word?"

The game was really afoot when the spelling reformers found a sugar daddy in the person of Andrew Carnegie. The philanthropic steel titan counseled a name change for the organization ("reform" scares people, he insisted), and so the Spelling Reform Association became the Simplified Spelling Board. It was studded with such eminences as Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia, David Starr Jordan of Stanford, Mark Twain, and William James.

In March 1906, the SSB released a list of 300 words crying out for orthographic reform. Some of the recommendations had already slipped into accepted usage: "honor" without the u, "center" instead of "centre" "axe" with the e chopped off. But others looked bizarre: The SSB suggested replacing the "ed" in such words as "kissed" and "missed" with a t. "Purr" would lose an r, and such words as "dullness" and "fullness" would be stripped of an l. "Through" would become "thru," and "thoroughly" would shrink to "thoroly" It all seemed so ... mechanical. ...