We have, indeed,
told ourselves a thousand times over that bad spelling is not funny,
but is very tiresome. Yet it is no sooner laid aside and buried than
it gets resurrected. I suppose the real reason is that it is funny,
at least to our eyes. When Bill Nye spells wife with "yph" we can't
help being amused. Now Bill Nye's bad spelling had absolutely no
point to it except its oddity. At times it was extremely funny, but
as a mode it led easily to widespread and pointless imitation. It was
the kind of thing--like poetry--that anybody can do badly. It was
most deservedly abandoned with execration. No American editor would
print it to-day. But witness the new and excellent effect produced
with bad spelling by Mr. Ring W. Lardner. Here, however, the case is
altered; it is not the falseness of Mr. Lardner's spelling that is
the amusing feature of it, but the truth of it. When he writes, "dear
friend, Al, I would of rote sooner," etc., he is truer to actual
sound and intonation than the lexicon. The mode is excellent. But
the imitations will soon debase it into such bad coin that it will
fail to pass current. In England, however, the humour of bad spelling
does not and has never, I believe, flourished. Bad spelling is only
used in England as an attempt to reproduce phonetically a dialect; it
is not intended that the spelling itself should be thought funny, but
the dialect that it represents.
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