Spelling tricks from the days before autocorrect
People have been using mnemonics to help them spell words correctly almost as long as correct spelling has been considered something to strive for. In the Middle Ages, writers had no use for these tricks because orthography (from Greek orthos “correct” + graphia “writing”) was not a cultural aspiration. People wrote words down as they pronounced them, so woman, for example, could also be wommane, wommon, wuiman, waman, wemon, whoman, vomman, vimman, wifmanne, ummanne, vifmon, and so on.
By the 19th century, though, proper orthography had become big business. Noah Webster’s “The American Spelling Book,” for example, outsold every book but the Bible in the century after its publication in 1783.
John Michod’s “Orthographic Aids” (1855) was one of the first to include mnemonics, though they were on the whole not so catchy as they later became. Instead of “i before e except after c,” Michod has “The dipthong ei when it sounds like long e,/ Most frequently follows the consonant c/ Reverse it and if it still sound the same,/ it follows a consonant not c by name.”
Since then, spelling mnemonics have proliferated and gotten better. Some help distinguish homonyms: The capitol is a round building (not capital). The principal is your pal (not principle). Others cue us how to spell words that don’t look the way they sound: I’ll be a friend to the “end.” People shiver “br” in February. There’s “a rat” in separate.
Double letters are also cued by mnemonics. “One collar and two socks” or “one coffee and two sugars” reminds us that necessary has one c and two s’s. “Really red shows suffering” indicates that embarrass has double r’s and double s’s. I even came across one for my nemesis – “accommodate has lots of room” (doubles of all the potentially confusing letters).
Acronyms are the do-it-yourself mnemonic: If there’s a word that gives you trouble, it’s easy to come up with a phrase that encodes the spelling. Rhythm, for example, can be remembered as “Rhythm Helps Your Two Hips Move,” while the beginning of beautiful is represented by “Big Elephants Are Ugly.” These can be of limited use, however, as eventually the acronym becomes harder to remember than the word itself, as with “George’s Elderly Old Grandfather Rode A Pig Home Yesterday” and geography.
Mnemonics are cute anachronisms from a brief historical period when we wanted to spell words right and had only ourselves to rely on. Today, on our devices, we just need to spell a word in the general vicinity, and autocorrect fixes it.
