cause of the
disease. He ought to have gone to work on the alphabet. There's not
a vowel in it with a definite value, and not a consonant that you can
hitch anything to. Look at the "h's" distributed all around. There's
"gherkin." What are you going to do with the "h" in that? What the
devil's the use of "h" in gherkin, I'd like to know. It's one thing I
admire the English for: they just don't mind anything about them at all.

But look at the "pneumatics" and the "pneumonias" and the rest of them.
A real reform would settle them once and for all, and wind up by giving
us an alphabet that we wouldn't have to spell with at all, instead of
this present silly alphabet, which I fancy was invented by a drunken
thief. Why, there isn't a man who doesn't have to throw out about
fifteen hundred words a day when he writes his letters because he can't
spell them! It's like trying to do a St. Vitus's dance with wooden legs.

Now I'll bet there isn't a man here who can spell "pterodactyl," not
even the prisoner at the bar. I'd like to hear him try once--but not
in public, for it's too near Sunday, when all extravagant histrionic
entertainments are barred. I'd like to hear him try in private, and when
he got through trying to spell "pterodactyl" you wouldn't know whether
it was a fish or a beast or a bird, and whether it flew on its legs or
walked with its wings. The chances are that he would give it tusks and
make it lay eggs.

Let's get Mr. Carnegie to reform the alphabet, and we'll pray for
him--if he'll take the risk. If we had adequate, competent vowels, with
a system of accents, giving to each vowel its own soul and value, so
every shade of that vowel would be shown in its accent, there is not
a word in any tongue that we could not spell accurately. That would be
competent, adequate, simplified spelling, in contrast to the clipping,
the hair punching, the carbuncles, and the cancers which go by the name
of simplified spelling. If I ask you what b-o-w spells you can't tell
me unless you know which b-o-w I mean, and it is the same with r-o-w,
b-o-r-e, and the whole family of words which were born out of lawful
wedlock and don't know their own origin.

Now, if we had an alphabet that was adequate and competent, instead of
inadequate and incompetent, things would be different. Spelling reform
has only made it bald-headed and unsightly. There is the whole tribe
of them, "row" and "read" and "lead"--a whole family who don't know w