Going SyCo!

As an American writing about my home away from home, a province in Canada, I have been faced with making decisions on the spelling and unit of measure conventions to be used. Should I use American or Canadian English spelling? Should I use metric or imperial units of measurement? Since road signs in Canada use the metric system I have conceded to using metric units for linear distance. But imperial distance statements will appear when I have quoted sources from pre-metric days (Canada went metric in the 1970’s). Regarding elevation, I have followed the standard used by the Surveys and Mapping Branch, Department Of Energy And Mines which uses feet to define their contour intervals. Regarding things like temperature and volume I have used the standards employed by the local media.

But spelling is, to use a distinctly maritime phrase, a different kettle of fish. I read and understand Canadian but I do not write Canadian. I once accused a fellow worker from the United Kingdom of being a filthy vowel wasting limey bastard for what I consider to be their overly lavish use of vowels. How many vowels are really needed to spell color or honor? It seems like two ought to be enough. Looking back I am surprised that during the early days of computing, when mainframe computers only supported up to 8mb of memory and as little as 40mb of hard disk storage capacity, that there was not a movement to conserve storage space by adopting American English among all English speaking nations. Conserving storage space was something on the minds of every programmer at that time. It was the storage saving measure of using of only 2 digits for recording a year that lead to the need for widespread updates to archaic programs to avoid Y2K bugs. But, regardless, the Standard English speaking world, which includes Canadians, has carried on this tradition of being vowel spendthrifts. Users of Standard English also spell some words differently than Americans but without the guilt of using extra letters. The alternate spellings of various words such as defence and tyres cause my spell checker to issue a lot of red squiggly underlines. The use of colloquialisms is easy enough to understand. Localized expressions used by populations separated by some geographic barrier, such as distance, oceans or a mountain range, can cause an occasional hindrance to communications but they are justifiable in terms of why they exist. The different use of vowels is another thing and far more mysterious. It turns out that many of the now characteristic American English spellings were introduced, although often not created, by Noah Webster in his ‘An American Dictionary of the English Language’ of 1828. Webster was a strong proponent of spelling reform for both philological and nationalistic reasons. He wanted to create further separation from the mother land and saw the elimination of unnecessary vowels as a practical means to achieve this. ¹

The time honored tradition of Standard English to waste vowels has been a pet peeve of mine for years. But, this irritation never extended to other languages that are also overly generous in their use of vowels. On the 1757 map of Acadia by French cartographer Nicolas Bellin, Canso is spelled as Canceaux. The orthography of Canso has varied much over the years. It has been spelled as; Campseau, Canceaux, Canco, Cancoe, Canseau, and now the thankfully brief and vowel conserving Canso. ² I think the other languages don’t offend me in this regard, even when three freaking vowels are strung together consecutively, because I have no idea how the coupling of letters works for any language other than English. To paraphrase Bob Dylan – you can’t criticize what you don’t understand.

The spelling of Guysborough is an obvious affront to my sense of vowel frugality. I am especially exacerbated by the current spelling for the shire town since in the past Guysboro was an accepted spelling. From what I can tell the spelling went through a period of transition sometime around the end of the 19th century when both spellings were used. Harriet C. Hart, in her 1877 book ‘The History of Guysborough County’ uses both spellings, using Guysborough as the spelling for the county and Guysboro as the spelling for the town. Likewise, the Star newspaper was a local Guysborough publication and in an edition from 1892 the masthead looked something like this..

Going in the complete opposite direction from vowel wasting to text message brevity, on one trip to Guysborough I bought a tee shirt from the Skipping Stone Café and Store (a fine eclectic retail establishment that is now sadly closed) that says ‘GBro Since 1634’. Going from ‘Guysborough’ to the sobriquet ‘GBro’ saves a lot of letters. In the spring of 2014 there was a story covered by national news organizations about a middle school student who determined that the US Government could save millions of dollars in ink by simply going to a thinner font. In addition to going to a thinner font, the Canadian Government could add to those ink saving measures by eliminating unneeded vowels (and consonants). There would also be some measurable amount of savings in labor by reducing the number of keystrokes during input. Perhaps a social media induced reductive patois could provide a beneficial cost savings change to the written form of Standard English.

And before you start thinking that all this talk about wasted vowels is the ranting of a singular crazy old man you might consider that back in the early 1900’s the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie introduced a simplified spelling movement. It was his belief that shortening words would help in simplifying communications and that could lead to a better understanding between nations and be an agent for peace. Carnegie had the support of President Theodore Roosevelt and many other notable figures including Mark Twain.

But, brevity does have its disadvantages. By the time I finally got a cell phone and started to communicate via text messaging my wife was already quite savvy with abbreviated messaging. One day I texted a question to her and her answer was ‘Idk’. I didn’t know what that meant so I asked her what does ‘Idk’ mean and her reply was ‘I don’t know’. It was then that I had a Gracie Allen moment and asked her why she was texting me something of unknown meaning to her. Sometime later we were having an in person conversation and I asked her a question to which she verbally replied ‘Idk’. I couldn’t suppress my inner Gracie and replied that we all decay sooner or later.

I’ll make just one more point about British and Canadian English spellings. Look at the Standard English spelling of a word like centre. What sort of phonetic folly gets the ‘ter’ sound out of ‘tre’? Plus, ‘centre’ leads to ‘centring’ (centering) and ‘centred’ (centered) – WTF! I guess that in context I would understand what centring means but, if I had somehow stumbled across this word out of context I would have had to look it up. The spelling of ‘programme’ is totally out of control. Besides an extra vowel there is even an extra consonant. But, I do applaud the Canadians for siding with their North American comrades south of the border in the spelling of such words as airplane (versus aeroplane) and aluminum (versus aluminium) - although I am a bit torn here as aluminium is more fun to say. American English is not totally innocent with regard to economizing vowels. For instance, the US is reluctant to let go of the unnecessary vowel baggage at the end of the word catalog(ue). The default American English spell checker I use confirms this by not issuing a ‘you are a dumbass’ squiggly line under either spelling. Regardless of this minor infraction I have used American English in all cases except when a quotation is used that included wasted vowels in its original form. And in the spirit of alphabet frugality provided by my GBro tee shirt I now see fit to refer to the two eastern most counties on mainland Nova Scotia (Antigonish and Guysborough), that were once one county known as Sydney County - as SyCo. This is just for the sake of brevity and nothing else should be read into this. However, it should be noted that all my SyCo trips have proven to be good for my sanity.

¹ [Wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_differences#Spelling]
² HC Hart History of Guysborough County pg10