Education: Gungs & Boms

In a lengthy letter to the London Times, George Bernard Shaw told the world what was wrong with the atom bomb. It was misspelled.

G.B.S. was harping on a favorite string. He had promised to will $80,000 to anyone with a plan to make English “economic.” But lately he had been appalled anew at the discovery that he could write “bomb” only 18 times a minute and “bom” 23 times. Stormed Shaw: “The extra sign is entirely senseless, it not only wastes the writer’s time, but suggests an absurd mispronunciation, as if the word ‘gun’ were to be spelt ‘gung.’ “

“Phoneticians have wasted a century raising an empty laugh over the spelling of cough. They have never knocked into our heads the simple fact that a letter saved in spelling is saved not once but millions of times. Millions of hours [are] now wasted in a sort of devil worship of Dr. Johnson.”

He himself, he surmised, is the “only phonetician, economist and man of letters who realizes how much money there is in a British alphabet with which every sound in our speech can be written with one graphic symbol.” Shaw appealed to the British Government “as a labor government” to do something about it.

In Manhattan, Barnard College’s Philologist William Cabell Greet agreed with Shaw generally, but didn’t think any democratic government—U.S. or British—could get anywhere against the sentiment that people attach to spelling. Said he: “If the Japanese had dictated peace, they might have been able to dictate a simplified spelling. . . .”