The medical profession and simplified spelling / by Burt G. Wilder.

  • Wilder, Burt G. (Burt Green), 1841-1925.
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The medical profession and simplified spelling / by Burt G. Wilder. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    ), c. * plified Spelling Board gular No. n, Feb. 28, 1907 THE M^lCXAjI|/|/j^«gg,E^SION AND J SIMPLIFI^, SPELLING1 By BURT G. k S. B„ M. D. 1■ Professor of Neurology and Vertebrate Zoology in Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y. “What attaches us to our conventional spelling is not a body of convictions, but simply habit and feeling. * * Usage is another name for fashion, and fashions do not grow out of the ground or fall from Heaven, but are created by some one’s initiative.” Calvin Thomas. “Language is an organism; the organism that dislikes change is very ill, the one that fights change is moribund, and the one that does not change is dead.” George M. Gould. Like him who is challenged to a duel, he who is invited to address a society is accorded the privilege of choosing his subject. Yet. not- withstanding my keen personal interest in the simplification of spell- ing (as akin to the Simplification of Anatomic Nomenclature that has occupied me largely for more than the fourth of a century2) I should refrain from exercising my prerogative in this particular direction but for my conviction that it is the duty of the members of our pro- fession to recognize the existing defects of English spelling, to appre- ciate the past and present efforts to improve it, and to cooperate with the simplifiers in their individual, professional and associational capacities. The defects of current English spelling fall under two heads, viz., (1) Superfluity of letters,3 involving waste of time, energy, space and money. The following examples, representing groups, are se- lected from the “List of Common Words Spelled in Two or More Ways” (the Three Hundred Words), of which the simpler forms are recommended in place of the longer forms by the Simplified Spell- 1. Read, by invitation, before the thirty-ninth annual meeting of the Medi- cal Association of Central New York, Oct. 16, 1906. Reprinted, with some alterations, from The Buffalo Medical Journal of January, 1907. 7. See, e. g., “A partial revision of the nomenclature of the brain, Amer. Assoc. Adv. Sci., 1880, Medical Record, vol. 18, p. 328. “Paronymy versus heter- onymy as neuronymic principles,” address, as president, before the Amer. Neu- rol. Assoc., 1885, Transactions, Jour. Nerv. and Mental Disease, vol. 12; “Neural terms, international and national,” Jour. Comp. Neurology, vol. 6, 1896; “Terminology, Anatomical” (with S. H. Gage), in Reference Handbook of the Med. Sciences, 1st ed., vol. 8; “Some misapprehensions as to the simplified nomenclature of anatomy,” address, as president, before the Assoc. Amer. Anat- omists, 1898, Science, April 21st, 1899. 3. For this phrase a single word would be convenient. Perissogrammatism (‘too-many-letter-ness’) is most appropriate. If its length and unfamiliarity are objectionable there may be considered literosity (adjective litcrose), and literage, after the analogy, respectively, of verbosity and verbiage.