Richard Lederer, author of Anguished English and other popular language books: "If you love language and the unvarnished truth, you'll love Everything You Know About English Is Wrong."
FeatureBook.com: "A good counterpoint to Lynne Truss’s anxiety-inducing Eats, Shoots & Leaves."
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Sample Entries:
Everything You Know About English Is Wrong is about the BS (and in this case, bee-S) often associated with grammar "rules," word "origins," famous "real" quotes, and other common "knowledge" you can put into "quote marks." This sample chats about spelling bees, and this fine word:
Debt
File under “B, Spelling”: Debt is undoubtedly subtly misspelled.
I’ve participated in my share of spelling bees over the years, getting my backside kicked off the stage for such transgressions as inserting an E into the final syllable of Septuagint. I should have just stood there and said, “Septuagint. G-I-M-N-illiterate. Septuagint.” I’ve obviously never won a spelling bee.
Spelling bees are pretty much an English-speaking event, because other languages are much more consistent with spelling convention. Holding a spelling bee for a language with strong adherence to phonetics would be something akin to having a math bee in which contestants rattle of the numerals for a given number. “Bill, your number is one thousand and one.”
I clear my throat, ask for and receive a definition of one thousand and one, ask for and receive an alternate pronunciation, then inquire about the origin (“Arabic numerals, stupid!” someone shouts from the audience). Then I say, “One thousand and one. One-Zero-Zero-One. One thousand and one.” And then, because I left out the comma after the first one, I am booted off the stage, left to ponder what the heck a Septuagint is.
All that is long lead-in to a letter that centuries ago was injected artificially into English words, and therefore into spelling bees. That letter is, of course, B.
Let’s take the word debt. We pronounce it “det.” At one time, as late as the mid 1500s, we even spelled it det. Or variations thereof, like dett and dette. So where did B come marching into the bee? When “learned” monks transliterating manuscripts decided that the Latin origins of that word (related to debit) demanded a b to make it “truer” to its origins. We also owe our spelling of subtle, doubt and (of all things) plumber to such actions. Me, I think the monks changed the spellings so that bad spellers could last longer in spelling bees to drive audience interest, the way they keep bad singers around for so many episodes of American Idol.
OK, enough ranting about this subject. I’m just going to lebt it B.
(An aside that has nothing to do with anything: I'd love to see a spelling bee in which one of the words is “BB, a small pellet projectile used in air rifles,” just so we could hear the featured speller announce: “BB. B-B. BB.”)
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