Against spelling

 

Trust me, I once wrote a book before Chat GPT was invented.

As a wizard, I should be a hexpert on spelling. Obvz. But the strategist would know their enemy:

Scene one: the English language is in its infancy, the violence of German is met with the subtlety of Latin. Monks are copying the Bible in Latin, while the plebs spit their vile commerce with whatever words they can chew. Spelling is but a dream. Words are in anarchy, the pre-modern state of benighted, decadent, degenerate non-standardization. Creativity flows as the spoken becomes written.

Scene two: Garland invents the word dictionary, c. 1220. Writing is more of a thing. 1806, Noah Webster on one side of the Atlantic, the Oxford University Press c. 1884 on the other side. Spelling is formalized, albeit with competing numbers of the letter "u" depending on whether you're in the Americas or the British Isles. 

Scene three: spelling is industrialized. Gutenberg starts pressing the Bible to the page c. 1440 (in German). The common man learns to read, then the common woman, then even common children. Writing, printing!, becomes commonplace, widespread, malignant, a cancer growing its own way on the daughters and sons of Adam and Eve, banished by flame and sword from our natural state in Eden. Speaking to each other by ink and paper.

Scene four: There is but one way to spell each word (until you reach the other side of the Atlantic). The rise of the screen reveals a crack in the supremacy of the thin sheet of dead tree. Then, the screen reveals the Internet, a gawdy, brawling, bawling monster, cute in its infancy, but rising Cthulhu to an apotheosis beyond Zeus, Jesus, Allah and 1993's incarnation of the Buddha. Microsoft Word starts underlining belligerent spellings with red squiggly lines. Don't trust a program called "Word" to give you freedom in how you spell words. Calcification.

Scene four and a half: The widespread penetration of SMS short message service technology causes an equally-widespread mass psychotic panic in high school education when teens innovate the spelling of words with a barrage of abbreviations designed to squeeze their social lives into atoms of 160 characters. Twitter follows suits with the 160 character limit. Gamers intentionally obfuscate words (especially cuss words) with the digit-letter substitution code known as 1337. Innovation. Acronyms become words, lol. Dictionaries try vaguely to respond, with a mixture of resistance and vain attempts to maintain their status as authorities: in 2007, Merriam-Webster grants word-of-the-year status to "w00t". Water seeps through the cracks of the dam: the prescriptive view of language cannot hold back the onslaught of language-made-by-use. 

Scene five: T9 texting gives way to "predictive text", the Blackberry is released with a full keyboard in miniature, Steve Jobs announces a 3-in-one internet device, iPod and cellphone. The 160 character thing stops being so important. Twitter increases then removes the limit. The prescriptivists hold a back-room party, open the champagne and hang the message in big colorful paper letters, "Welcome back, sanity." Spelling is back on top. You can configure your keyboard to make you spell The Right Way, for the Right on either the left or the right side of the Atlantic.

Scene six: Open AI release a new not-search engine called Chat GPT. Generative pre-trained transformer. While most of the word is celebrating xor hand wringing about the birth of artificial intelligence, Chat GPT and its soon numerous copycats are writing irritatingly delightful, perfect prose. They are modifying our tone, our style. (M$ Word would also highlight some of your sentences with a green underline, the "grammar checker," which was pretty good at noticing when you fell pry to the dread "passive voice" but that was not a feature that was as widely copied as the red-underline spell checker.) Impeccable grammar and a bright, helpful, energetic tone is now available to every plumber, undergraduate student, saint, dandy and social media influencer. And, gosh, these large language models, they know so much, dahling. Independent thought puts on its dusty gray suit and catches the empty nine pm train to the mortuary. Correct spelling is assumed.

Scene seven: Not all is as it should be in the post-large-language-model world. Imagine a crack in the shield of utopia, with me, eh? When maverickness is a commodity, when the differently thinking are on top, when a golfing real estate exec is sitting plumly in the White House (for his sins, and ours). When every teenager in their parents garage is under the heavy cloud of having the potential to start a unicorn business. The wise shut their laptop lids, put their phones in the freezer (with or without the plastic bag) and wander out barefoot into the snow to hide among living trees (not yet made into paper for correctly spelled words). The person on the bus is invisible, not only because of the prosaic ugliness of their normal, non-make-up'd, non-photoshopped, non-Instagrammable realness, but mostly becausedears we're all looking at the Cthulhunet through our phonescreens.

And now: What if I told you, Matrix-pill-style, that the chocie was yurz? You have the keyboard, you tipe teh letterz. Spells are what you make them.

And it's t1me to get creativestyle. 

Mis-spellings typically signal carelessness, a vice. My modest suggestions are partially for distinguishing the wise old freethinking humankindess from the language from models of language. But they are also a mere thought on freedom of expression into the great meadows beyond the squiggly red underlines.

• Take on the German approach of kitbanging words together via the omission of spaces.
• Hyphenation is another typographic aid to the Überspeller. 
• Everyone has a dictionary in their palm, so use that weird word. Everyone has a multilingual dictionary for every language in their hand, so use that foreign word. Even better, mash up that foreign word with an English one. 
• Correct spellings when the deviant spelling obfuscates your message. Clarity is still (usually) a virtue.
• Enjoy leetspeek, SMS-isms and whatever other alternatives you can find. Add these in like spices in the kitchen. The right amount, in the right place.
• Spell in alternative ways when it elevates and electrifies words.
• Spell with the spoken word in mind. Alternative spellings maybe map to alternative ways of speaking. Th-th-this gives you an idear.

The beaten path is now mechanized by LLMs. When you want to walk that way, why not take the bus and use the LLMs? When you want us to hear you, then what are you going to say -- and how are you going to spell -- differently? 

This spellfree dance is, of course, one big foolserrand, childsplay in the shad0w of the Sing-aling-a-ding-dongularity. But if you don't have to mechanize interaction with all your customers on your OnlyFans, tilt some election with fakenewspam, or you don't have to write an infinite number of advertisements, then maybe you can face the situation that humanwriting is like doing pottery at home, not "scalable," not optimized, not commercial-viable-with-VC-interest-for-your-unicornic-potential. Maybe it's just fun.