Hey, U! Scram!

That, apparently, is the first thing the Colonists said after defeating the British.

Oh, sure, the history books claim it was to end taxation without representation, but what really happened is that the newly minted Americans snatched the letter U out of a whole bunch of words and sent it packing to England with the Redcoats.

Thus, the Brits have “colour,” “behaviour” and “glamour,” while we here in the United States spell those words “color,” “behavior” and “glamour.” Um… I guess a few of the more glamorous U’s escaped.

Now that’s odd. The U clung on for dear life to the word “glamour,” but in the word “glamorous,” it shuffles on down the road by a few letters.

Why? Well, way back in the early 1800s or so, Noah Webster, the self-proclaimed spelling bee champion of Putnam or any other county, decided to write the great American dictionary. His goal was to simplify words so that they were spelled just like they sounded.

Therefore, “colour” became color. “Favourite” became “favorite.” And “knyghte” was simplified to the just-like-it-sounds “knight.”

Give the guy a break. It’s easy to doze off in a dictionary. The vocabulary is extensive, but the plot is boring. Sure, it has action and adventure, but only as single-word entries under the letter A.

Who knows, maybe before N-Web got hold of them, they were “action” and “adventeer.”

This simplified English language is nuts.

If the goal is to spell it the way it sounds, how did we end up with “there,” “their” and “they’re,” or (oar) “to,” “too” and “two” or (ore) “for,” “four” and “fore”?

Or what about the spelling of words like “asthma” and “colonel”? Why not scribble “azma” and “kernel”?

When kids are learning to read, we encourage them to “sound it out.”

The great philosopher Gallagher was known to rant about this sound-it-out craziness. He held up a notebook with the word “bomb,” flipped one letter, and now had “tomb.” Another letter flip, and he had “comb.”

Change a single letter in front, and the last three automatically change pronounciations. I mean, pronunciations. (This time, we left in the U, and discarded the O. Why? (Or Y?) No clue.)

Suddenly, text spellings that I abhorred are beginning to make sense. IDK Y. They just due. Er, doo. I mean, deux. Dew. Ah, c’mon, the correct doo-doo has gotta be in Noah Dubya’s dictionary somewhere.

Back to Gallagher. He wondered why if rhyming stanzas are pronunced (“pronounced”? — why did the “O” go back?) “poem,” how come the word “home” switches the order of the “M” and “E”?

And if they both sound pretty much the same, why does the word “some” switch up the sound? And why do “some” and “dumb” sound the same but are spelled differently?

C’mon kiddies, sound out those words.

What is the letter “B” even doing in words like “dumb,” “comb” and twice in “bomb”? If it’s just going to be a wallflower at the party and not make a peep, why didn’t it get sent back to England with the letter “U”?

(True, my name would be much more difficult to pronounce without the “B” and “U” at the beginning. “Rton,” maybe, but “Rt”…?)

Further hampering all this spelling and sounding out madness are regional idioms. My dad always sent us to the bathroom to “warsh” or faces. When, I went to kindergarten, where a likeness of George “Warshington” stared down at us, the other kids thought I was hilarious.

“There’s no ‘R’ in ‘washcloth,'” they chortled.

“How do you know? We haven’t learned to spell yet,” I snapped.

Sixty years later and history (or possibly “histoury”) repeated itself. I was sitting in a barbershop in northern Kentucky and mentioned that I had a friend in Louisville, which I, not being a dummy, pronounced “Looeyville,” because few words are pronounced like they’re spelled.

The lady with the scissors laughed. She informed me that the locals call it “Low-o-vole” or something like that. I’m not exactly sure yet how to say it, but I sure didn’t want to send the lady with a sharp cutting tool at my neck in any more giggle spasms.

It’s a wonderful thing, the English language. Just remember, don’t ever spell a word just like it sounds. You’ll be wrong. Or possibly wroung.

Rite, right or write Cole at burton.w.col@gamail.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook. No points will be deducted for spelling.