from VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly, Spring 1983 © 1983 VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Used with permission. Word City: A New Language Tool, originated and compiled by Marvin Morrison, xxi + 352pp., Pilot
Light, 1982 (Word City is an earlier edition of Morrison's Sound-It-Out Speller) Although I once lost – placed second, which is the same thing
– a spelling bee by leaving the second e out of immediately, I am a pretty good speller. Occasionally, I might check a dictionary
to determine which of a number of variants is "preferred," but
most of the time I know the correct spelling of a word. One of
my classmates when I lost the spelling bee – I was nine at the
time – was such a poor speller that we speculated on his ability
to spell his own name correctly. Perhaps today he might be classified
as dyslexic, but In those good old antediluvian days, In those good old days of yore, When all the beasts were elephants And the water H2SO4, he was simply known as a lousy speller. I think he might have been helped by this book, which is the cleverest
method I have yet seen for showing the correct spelling of words
that one cannot spell – even those to which you may not have a
clue. "How can I look it up if I can't spell it?" – the logical
cry of the bad speller – is the very theme of Word City. I am not familiar enough with every approach to the bad speller's
problem to know whether the technique developed by Morrison is
unique, but I can say it works. It is much to be preferred, too,
to the solutions offered by other "bad speller's" dictionaries
I have seen: they tend to list words in their incorrect spellings,
following the entry with the correct spelling. That is not a good
practice because it shows the wrong spelling in print and may
help to fix it in the mind of the user. Morrison's approach is to strip a word of its vowels (the culprits
that cause most of the spelling problems) and to merge the consonant
sounds together. Sounds, that is: forget that you know that philosophy begins with a ph-, and "respell" it FLSF; ignore your recollection that psychology likewise begins with a p-, and render it SKLJ. To do this, you must follow Morrison's phonetic
rules (the first g in gauge is G, the second is J). The compressed clusters of consonants
are arranged in alphabetical order throughout the book, which
means that you do have to know the alphabet. The front matter
provides an exceptionally clear set of instructions, quickly learned,
on how to use the book. I checked a few words that I see misspelled quite often. Misspell is certainly one, and I found it readily enough under MSPL, along
with misapply, misapplied, misapplies, and its inflections, misspelt or misspelled. Another gem is accommodate, which I found under KMDT, along with accommodated, accommodating, commodity, and commodities, but without accommodation. GJ yields gage-pledge, gauge-measure, and gouge, with their inflected forms. (I found an alphabetical hiccup
here: GHD and GHT are out of order, but why complain?) RT covers
right, rite, wright and write, each with its own gloss. Included are more than 45,000 words (and their inflected forms),
which ought to be enough for a beginning. I am not sure I would
have listed which under HWCH, without showing it, along with witch and watch, under WCH, since in the speech of many the initial sounds by
w- and wh- are homophonic, but Morrison can take care of such matters in
a later edition. As a simple answer to a problem that besets many people, Word City stands out as a useful and elegant solution. _________________
Laurence Urdang's
review of Word City
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