Hey, we may swim in this pond together but you can't go around calling your
fellow fish dum bass. Sure the upper crust had the big tome on their desks
but many of the back woods types were taught phonetics until the primers
went west so like I said standard spelling unfolded over time. I would
guess that Andrew didn't tote that reference around, but wasn't Andrew
Jackson the Col who led the rough necks in the Battle of New Orleans, so
that would put him as being educated in school in the lat 1700's.
Daniel
It's one thing to be a total dumbass with spelling and/or punctuation
and be brilliant with language otherwise. Yeats is a good example.
It's another thing to just be a dumbass :).
From what I've heard standard spelling of English started no later than
the publication of the first English dictionary (don't recall the year,
but certainly before 1880), and before then some unwritten standards
were being applied.
Just think about a lot of the 19th cent. stuff you read -- say, like
Matthew Arnold, or the Brownings, or Twain's non-fiction -- and you
won't find too many spellings that seem irregular.
Jim
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Received on Wed Aug 27 16:33:10 2003
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