OUGH THE COUGH

Ever since I began a study of public audio music by not listening to it-ads, supermarket music, elevator music, bank music, dentist music, please--hold music, more ads--I've found myself not listening in another direction-audio words. How could I help it--I'm surrounded.

Ours is the wordiest era in human history, and most of those words, billions of them, are audible. We may not listen, but they impact us just the same.

To be sure, most of this wordy audio says nothing much while suggesting almost anything. The quantities are huge, but the vocabulary is micro.

Neo-basic English! The Hundred Great Words. Discover, discover. Have you "discovered" that new luxury car yet? Plonk down the cash and you will have.

Now more than ever. If we are kids, we learn our language from these, we hear them a thousand times a day. Nobody, though, is going to learn to write and to spell by listening to such messages.

Does daddy's seat belt talk? Some do.

The people-weigher in your bathroom? The same. These words of wisdom do not require spelling. And so, it seems, spelling is going down the drain. Along with written language.

Torrents of words, audible words.

Rivers of them, mountains, deserts, oceans. In comparison, for all our junk mail and newsprint, the visible word is nothing. It's an audible age, and the age of electronics and photonics too All the world's non-audio speech, "live" from mouth to ear, is a trickle compared to audible audio.

As soon as our kids pick up the alphabet, they begin to write, not what they have seen but what they hear. You don't learn spelling rules on TV, except maybe on Sesame Street. You learn the sound of language. Audio language. And you write that sound as well as you can and quite reasonably.

"Hi Ed glad your back for another great year," writes the nine-year-old daughter of one of my Canby Singers to me. It's on paper (in colors) but redolent of audio; her rendition of your, in place of you're, is exactly as she hears it. And isn't everything on TV "great"? Basic English. This continues, now, with kids grown a lot older. "Dear Sir, Yours of the 12th inst. received and thanks." Old-fashioned business letter.

"Hi Ed, my name is John and I want to tell you all about...." Newfangled business letter. Guess where that style comes from? For better or worse.

This new sound of words also goes right on into new kinds of audio sound and action. Like the phone ad. I'm a reactionary; for me the phone ad is an invasion of privacy, a trespass exactly as if someone should walk through my front door uninvited. But again it is a part of where things are going. The phone rings, I run, and hear "Hi, Ed, my name is Steve and I want to tell you all about a wonderful-" Clunk. That's my phone answer. No use-five minutes later, another call and it's "Hi, Mr.

Canby my name is Jane and--" Clunk. Worst of all: "Hi, and how are you today?" Cl-whoops, it's the editor of this mag. Or my brother.

In a curious way, then, the enormous flood of electronically audible verbiage, totally new in the recent world, is taking our language back to its ancient origins, back before there were written words or even pictographs, hieroglyphics, or any other visible approximation of the sounds of speech.

Language, remember, is all natural. It has come down with us through millennia as part of the human package. We didn't invent it. We merely elaborate it, to fit our current needs. Languages grow as people grow. Language never stands still, until dead. And for most of human existence it has been exclusively audible. Never visible.

Languages in this state (and there are plenty left) have no problems with spelling. There is no spelling. Indeed, there are largely not even words-an invention of our civilized times designed mainly for the eye, not the ear.

Rather, there were (and are) sound clumps, groups of sounds that convey meaning. And as for grammar, it is simply custom-the way people say things among themselves. In small societies, no more is needed.

All the rules and spellings we have devised, then, are imposed on language after the fact. We do not create language out of a set of rules! And since languages change as people change, the rules and spellings must change too, if slowly and carefully, by degrees. Plough into plow? Gaol into jail? As if into like? Are not into an't (early 19th century), aren't, and then ain't (the tomato/potato syndrome)? Creeping progress-and inevitable.

We always need codification in modern language, standards agreed upon, as we need standards in audio engineering. Communication, interfacing, is the modern reason. Nothing matters as much. But the getting-together on rules for language is tough. The rules we have are often hopelessly outdated and therefore meaningless to new learners. Or merely obscure-in which case we must explain why they are so murky. Who's to believe if we merely say, "That's the way it is, and don't ask questions"? We have to be on the defensive if people are to learn to read, write, and spell as they have in the past. For kids it's primarily a sonic world. Who needs writing? Is it really so terrible that we are returning language toward its original audible form? I think not. We'll muddle it through. We have more vital problems, such as how to avoid global war and mass murder. If we figure that out, our reading abilities will surely adapt to all the audio and settle eventually into new patterns, not less communicative than before. Our biggest job right now is not to put the blame on kids for being bad spellers, worse in grammar and very poor readers, but to get at teachers and persuade them to realize what is involved in this volatile audio age. They need perspective and flexibility, to cope. They must understand where language comes from and how the rules came about. And they must be emphatic as to why we stick to the rules, even so, as a working agreement that everybody understands-or should understand.

If rules are really relaxed and anything goes, according to the sound, there will indeed be a mess. There is, already. But we have no choice-we must be positive, not merely critical and rigid, if we are to stay abreast of audio language as we now have it.

I think only an older person, dating from a time before audio appeared, can really understand the pressure.

Myself, for instance. I am old enough to wince at the sight of a mispeled (sic)

word. It looks wrong. It is wrong. I was taught before big radio, when movies were silent (with visible subtitles), and video/TV was only a thought in the lab.

And I had no trouble at all with spelling! To this day, I keep wondering howcome. Somehow, minus all our present audible verbiage, we had no problem learning spelling and writing by rote as the key to the unique world of books, magazines, newspapers, reading. We had no reason to question spelling. It was the way to exciting, joyous things, new doors to open up before us. This may sound highbrow, but it wasn't. The big world did depend, for communication, on knowing how to read and take in, to write and give forth. There wasn't any other way. .So naturally we learned to spell, to the top of our ability, and few kids had trouble. Nature favors us when we are young.

In my late years, I am slow, of course, where kids are fast, in learning new languages. Computer languages, for instance. But what was once learned stays put. I scorn those built-in electronic aids on typewriters, word processors, and personal computers, whereby if you misspell a word the thing beeps. How insulting! I will not be told by a machine how I must write.

See--I am a real old fogy. But I do have a certain respect, just the same, for a youngish adult who wrote me about a mild disability, a leg wound caused by a piece of driftwood hidden in long grass which was "sticken out." Isn't this the way most of us would say it? You can't blame him. It's that audio again.

A big part of the perspective we need is in the spelling practices of the past. Our rigid system, our agreement on what is right, is not very old. If you will look at 16th-century English, the glorious age of our language, you will be astonished at the haphazard spelling, any old way, even from the best minds of the time. Shakespeare? Shakspir? You could spell it as you wished.

Robert Dudley spelled his name, carved in wood in a prison tower, as Robard Dudle. No rules, only a bit of agreement. But it served a small country, a few million, where things moved slowly by horse and foot and the mails were even slower than ours. Nobody seemed to mind the deciphering that had to be done when anything was read. In the face of this, our own too rigid agreements begin to take on a lot better light.

Let me quote two segments straight from the 16th-century originals. First, a fanciful picture of Henry VIII and his royal successors, with rhyming verse along the bottom. Here's Henry:

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Behoulde the figure of a royall Kinge, One whome tweet victory euer did attende: From euery part wher he his power did bringe He homeward brought yeConquest in yeend And when yefates his vitall thred had spunne: He gaue his glory to a Vertuous Sunne.

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That is, he gave his glory to a son, Edward VI, who died at 16.

Considering 450 years have passed, the language is easily understandable.

The spelling is not. The communication is slow, even from the very center of British Civilization, the city of London.

Beyond the capital, days and weeks distant, the language was even more free in its spelling and pronunciation.

For example, a ballad, a printed sheet, concerning the murder of the Regent of Scotland, a fine man much lamented by the people. This was distributed widely soon after the murder-most of the people obviously could read it, if they took the time. Can we? It begins with a sort of title:

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The Exhortatioun to all pleasand thing is quahairin man can hail delyte to withdraw thair plesur from mankynde and to deploir the cruell Murther of unquhile my Lord Regentis Grace.

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Followed by seven stanzas of verse, clearly English if you can untangle them, exhorting nature to be funereal. Here's a piece:

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Cum Nettilis, thornie brairis and rew, With all foull filthie weid, Now plant yow quhair thir sweit flouris grew And place yow in thir steid.

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Which is to say, in modern spelling, "Come nettles, thorny briars and rue, with all foul filthy weeds, Now plant you where their sweet flowers grew And place you in their stead." There, in so many words, is the best reason we have for our own spelling system! It communicates, it's easy on the eyes, and we can read it fast with a minimum of deciphering.

Yes, spelling is arbitrary and often seems to be senseless today. What are our audio-minded kids to make of the well known ough words--through, plough, cough, rough, borough, though, tough, furlough? Dizzy. Suppose we had to write "off the cuff" as "ough the cough"? But these words are only accidentally the same, out of vastly different origins and times. The sounds probably always have been different. We could change that spelling-we have already. Plow, thru, tho, boro. These are already in use, if not official. How about coff, ruff, tuff? All in due time. We need to try out changes, without upsetting the entire system.

Just bit by bit, usefully.

So teachers, be reassured! Spelling is crazy, but it fills a desperate need in this audio age for easy communication in a complex world. We need this standard, as we need those in engineering, to interconnect our thoughts. Now more than ever, I might suggest.

(by: EDWARD TATNALL CANBY; adapted from Audio magazine, Mar. 1991)

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