The Hormns of a Dilemna

Every Friday, the so-nearly-six-you-can-almost-smell-it-year-old has his weekly spelling test at school. Simple stuff, obviously: goat, boat, coat, pneumatic, syzygy, that kind of thing.

And every Friday I think of Charlie Brown. Well, actually I think of Charlie Brown every day, but that’s another story. On Fridays, though, I particularly remember the sequence in which good ol’ Charlie Brown plucks up courage to enter the school-wide spelling bee, only to be eliminated in the first round because he spells ‘maze’ M-A-Y-S. He heard the word, and immediately thought of his hero Willie Mays (the only baseball players that have ever crossed my radar are the ones featured in Peanuts).

All in all, I’m quite relieved that Oliver’s current hero is Kevin Pietersen. No chance of confusion there.

But this week I was also reminded of something I heard at the beginning of the week, a spelling-related exchange that rocked the very foundations of my world. Rocked, I tell you.

I was listening, as is my shant, to the 5Live film podcast, a very entertaining offering in which Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode raise the art of niggly Odd-Couple-style bickering to Olympic levels, while occasionally talking about films and saying hello to Jason Isaacs.

For those unfamiliar with it, here is a brief rundown of the Kermodus Operandi:

1. He has opinions.

2. They are right.

3. That is all.

It’s an entertaining persona, but I especially like it when it turns out that he is as wrong as a pair of pink and yellow polka dot spats. For example, recently he’s taken to lecturing people about ending sentences with prepositions, which, as the saying goes, is the kind of pedantry up with which I will not put.

The film slated for slating on this occasion was Ron Howard’s latest, The Dilemma. The conversation started with a discussion about the spelling of the title, a subject that I would have thought merited about as much debate as a packet of Bland Nuts.

“So what is it with this new spelling of ‘dilemma’?” asked Kermode. “When did it change?”

“Exactly,” concurred Mayo. “When I grew up it was spelled ‘D-I-L-E-M-N-A’, but apparently they’ve changed it.”

Huh?

Dilemna?

I downed tools and went to check the dictionary. Had I gone mad? Had I been spelling it wrong all these years?

Nope.

There it was, in black and white. D-I-L-E-M-M-A. From the Greek, don’t you know. ‘Di’, meaning ‘twice’, and ‘lemma’, meaning ‘assumption’. Ah, the benefits of a classical education, I would be boasting now, had I not failed my Greek O-level quite spectacularly all those years ago.

No alternative spellings, no ‘arch.’, no ‘obs.’, no ‘also US, because they’re different over there’. Just D-I-L-E-M-M-A.

For good measure I checked the old OED that sits, proud and neglected, next to the others. Maybe dilemna was a real word in 1933, but was banned for breach of the ‘Consecutive Alphabetical Letters In Words’ Act.

Nah. Not there.

This was odd. These guys aren’t illiterate, they’re not uneducated, yet they had clearly been taught a spelling which doesn’t exist. And they weren’t the only ones. People emailed the programme, voting overwhelmingly in favour of ‘dilemma’ (‘Sir, never in all my 137 years as an English teacher...’, etc etc), but a few snuck in from listeners timidly confessing their adherence to the weird cult of ‘dilemna’.

So where had this alternative spelling come from? And then it dawned on me. There was only one possible answer.

A covert cell of guerrilla teachers, in the pay of an unnamed evil power, infiltrated the education system of this country in the sixties. Their mission: to spread misinformation about key aspects of the English language. Knowing the levels of bile and antagonism that can be generated in the linguistic pedantry wars (I still shudder at the memory of John Humphrys and his splenetic assault on ‘meet up with’ a few years ago), they put into action a perfidious plot to propagate rancour and disharmony throughout the land. In a few years, they must have thought, we will have brought the whole country sobbing to its knees. Mwaaahahahahahaaaaa.

How else do you explain the fact that nearly all sports commentators routinely treat us to such nonsenses as ‘the proof is in the pudding’?

The dilemma/dilemna dilemma/dilemna set me thinking about the quirkiness of English spelling, of which I’m as fond as the next man, unless that man is Japanese and grappling unsuccessfully with the challenge of the word ‘fritillary’. I’m no linguistician, but is there another language quite as renowned as English for slipping in silent letters, for WYSIANWYG (What You See Is Absolutely Not What You Get)? Impugn, condemn, subtle, phlegm, mnemonic, Worcester, Cholmondeley, Featherstonehaugh. These, and many more, are among my pfavourite wor3ds.

I suppose we do it, proud island race that we are, to confuse foreigners, to exclude them from the club.

“Dear me no, old chap, it may be spelled ‘Bluffingham’, but it’s pronounced ‘Bloom’.” Patronising chuckle.

Imagine you don’t speak English, and are given the following words: tough, trough, though, through and thorough. Five almost identical words. Five different pronunciations.

Poor old Johnny Foreigner.

[Sidebar: it’s possible, using conventional English pronunciation, to argue that the word sounding ‘gopher’ could be spelled thus: ghoughghough. ‘Gh’ as in ghoul, ‘ough’ as in though, ‘gh’ as in cough, ‘ough’ as in thorough. Read it again and you’ll get it. End of sidebar.]

It all brings home just how difficult English is for anyone fool enough to try and learn it from scratch. You think German is hard, with its confusing-for-beginners rule that the verb at the end of the sentence go must? Befuddled by Russian verbs of motion and their endless supply of prefixes? Grappling with the intricacies of the subjunctive in Italian?

Just try learning the rules of English spelling and pronunciation.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to teach my son how to spell haemorrhage.

Or is it haemnorrhage?

Comments

[The-Sis-In-Law]

1. Was there a conclusion to the dilemma/dilemna dilemma/dilemna?
2) Which spellchecker did you use for this blog post?
3) I met His Holiness The Almighty Kermode once, on the beach in Cannes. It was the Film Festival so we talked films of course. I also seem to remember he liked my cowboysunhat.
4) Have I told you the one about the Aussies on a train from St Pancras to Nottingham, asking if this was the train to Loogabarooga?
5) Condemn is a bit like dilemna... wonder if that's where the confusion comes from and whether condemn should actually be condemm...

[Lev Parikian]

1. Sorry, thought it was clear. Dilemma is the only way to spell dilemma. Nobody seems to know where dilemna came from.
2. I dont use a spellchecker. They are liable to allow such things as I combed my hare. If Im not sure I look it up in the dickshonery.
3. Kudos. I bet he liked your cowboy sunhat more than he liked Cannes.
4. Roffle. I once convinced a Canadian friend of Wife Number One that Peebles was pronounced Pebbles by the locals.
5. Maybe somebody got confused, but Im guessing theyre from different roots. Condemn seems like it comes from the same place as damn (and maybe indemnity and other similar words? Latin? Will now look it up.

Lev
[email protected]
www.runnythoughts.com

[Hugh Lydon]

I am currently learning Irish. The majority of sentences, when compared to their translation into English, seem to contain about triple the number of words. Their numbers can be pronounced, and spelt, is at least four different ways, and their alphabet only recently acknowledged that the letter 'v' exists.

Now that's a bonkers language.

[The-Sis-In-Law]

Welsh is missing some letters too. And has a nice line in bonkers series-of-consonants-without-a-vowel-in-sight words. Oh and, as my father is so keen to illustrate, mutations!
"Welsh has a system of mutations which affects the initial letters of words. This feature is common to all Celtic languages and can make it difficult to find words in dictionaries."
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/welsh.htm
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAHHHHHHHH :D

[Philip Austin]

Ghoti. Fish respelt.

I do like ghoughghough though - it reads like one of those laughter-turned-into- writing words (such as mwaaahahahaha). Perhaps the abortive laugh of a jolly, sixty a day, thirty-two stoner that turns from laughter into a ten minute coughing fit.

[Chris Johns]

Don't nkurrij him, Philip.
Er, Gh as in cough, ti as in Titian (2nd okrnce), o as in ? (Its less than 60 years since I was taught this, but more than 50, so I've forgotten).
Does one learn Irish, or does it just float to the top?

[UniveTer]

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