Listen & Learn Blog

Hanukkah is nearly over for this year, but there’s still time to consider how it’s spelt: Chanukah or Hanukkah?

The Jewish Festival of Lights apparently has no “correct” spelling – it is a transliteration of a Hebrew word into English. Rabbi Daniel Zemel of Washington, DC was asked by NPR about the spelling, and this is what he had to say:

“There’s several different difficult letters in terms of the transliteration,” he says. “There’s the (Hebrew spoken), there’s the (Hebrew spoken) and there’s the (Hebrew spoken), then there’s the (Hebrew spoken) at the end. And all of them have legitimately different variations on how to properly transliterate them.” (NPR.org)

The Rabbi also said he had to attend a committee at his synagogue to agree on which spelling would be put on their publicity materials – they went with C-H-A-N-U-K-K-A-H.

Some people are more fastidious about correct spelling and grammar than others. Then there are those that take their passion for correction to a new level – like Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson.

Deck and Herson travelled around the perimeter of America, looking for typos and attempting to correct them. And now they’ve written a book about their adventures – The Great Typo Hunt – Two Friends Changing The World, One Correction At A Time.

Over at the NPR website you can listen to their story and also read an excerpt from their book. And perhaps leave a grammatically correct comment, if you like.

Workers in North Carolina misspelled the word ‘school’ – on a road leading to a high school.

Instead of the correct spelling, they painted “shcool” on the road to mark out the school zone.

Perhaps they were trying to show how cool it is to go to school?

(Source: BBC News)

The annual Scripps National Spelling Bee often provokes wonder – at the words that the kids are asked to spell, at the kids themselves for spelling them – but seems fairly non-controversial.

At this year’s event though, there were protesters. They weren’t protesting because they thought terribilita was a made up word. They weren’t protesting because they didn’t know what stromuhr (the winning word) means. Nope, they were protesting because they think English spelling should be made simpler.

From the New Yorker:

The argument that English spelling should be overhauled is nothing new, of course. Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain were both advocates for “spelling reform,” and George Bernard Shaw’s will stipulated that a competition should be held to develop a new, more efficient English writing system. The resulting phonetic alphabet was named the “Shavian alphabet,” after Shaw.

But while efforts to reshape and standardize English spelling have been around (almost) as long as English itself, some of the vehement (and dead-serious) arguments made by this year’s protesters are almost too delightfully bizarre to be true. Alan Mole, chair of the American Literacy Council and member of the London-based Spelling Society said “Our odd spelling retains words like cough, bough, through and though. This increases illiteracy and crime.” Sure, spelling can be tuf (ha!), but is it criminally difficult?

Yep, the protesters were arguing that spelling increases illiteracy and crime… interesting. Although my inability to spell ‘Mississippi’ correctly in a spelling contest at school, leading to a humiliating second-place finish, did make me feel like tearing up a dictionary – but that’s not a crime, right?

On a side note: an interesting stat on the Spelling Bee homepage reveals that out of 273 entrants, 102 speak languages other than English, and 21 spellers do not have English as their first language. It’s pretty amazing that these kids are so dedicated to obscure English words!