Everybody knows there's only one way to write...

It was 1963, late in the year. The snow in windy Chicago was already piled up the steps of our 'townhouse' apartment. Not flat, apartment. It had two storeys and a cellar/basement/whatever-you-call-it (we kids called it a playroom), nothing flat about it. My sister, age 9, was sprawled on her belly on the living-room carpet, one eye on the Dick Tracy cartoon, tongue out as she wrestled with what she called 'an ink pen' (pronounced 'pi-yin'), and what you might call a biro. My 11-year-old self was 'wallering' (translation: reclining) on the couch (translation: sofa)¹ immersed in the book my Chicago friend David had lent me. The book was about World War II, and had German in. This first glimpse of Oodle Doodle Flip – the beginning of a lifelong obsession – had me in thrall (translation: I was really interested). I was just sounding out the word 'Oberstleutnant' when a plea for help came from the floor.

'D, how do you spell 'snuck'?'

'S-N-U-C-K,' I replied absently. I was distracted by the phrase 'Hände hoch', which I was encountering for the first time. This, my first umlaut sighting ever, blinded me for a moment to the nature of the question. After a brief delay, during which my sister plied her 'pen' and my little grey cells got to working in the vernacular again, I ventured, 'Er, what are you writing?'

'Book report.'

I cleared my throat. 'Then you can't say, 'snuck'. If it's for the teacher, it has to be 'sneaked'. Or 'crept'...'sidled'...entered covertly...stealthily...' (My contemporaries hated me for many valid reasons, one of which was my ridiculous vocabulary. Except for David, who lent me books with Oodle Doodle Flip in.)

My sister sat up in outrage. 'I just did this in INK!' she howled. 'MA-MA! Dmitri made me mess up my homework!'

My mother, from the kitchenette: 'How many words have you written so far, hon?'

My sister, counting. Slowly². 'Fifty.'

My mother, drily, 'You'll survive. And Dmitri?'

'Yes, ma'am?'

'Pay more attention to your sister, next time.'

'Yes, ma'am.' I went back to the Kriegsgefangenlager – the hero had just been told that 'for him the war was over' – but I kept one ear open for fourth-grade spelling requests.

For me, obviously, the language wars were not over.

I was a child in Memphis, Tennessee, during the early Cold War. This meant that there was a very large river downtown³, we had to practice 'Duck and Cover' (in case the Commies dropped 'adam bums', a local pronunciation), and our teachers were armed with little more than a piece of chalk and their wits.

We were kind of old-fashioned, but those ladies – no male teachers in elementary (translation: primary) schools back then⁴ – were educational warriors. They lent us their own books. They read to us after lunch. They told us stories, and took us on field trips (translation: school outings). Okay, one field trip was a half-mile (translation: .8 km) to the local bakery (translation: bread factory), where we could watch the bread being made by machine while sitting in our mothers' cars. (This was considered cool in the 1950s. You had to have been there.) Then we went back to our classroom, where we ate the hot bread (translation: conglomeration of chemicals and over-refined white flour) with the butter (translation: butter) we had just made ourselves, by passing around a Mason jar (translation: er, do you have those? Glass jars with a metal lid for home canning?) full of unhomogenised milk from a cow (translation for Glaswegians: coo). It took about half an hour of vigorous shaking. Dee-lish. Oh, and we learned something about process.

Another trip was to the 'peh-nul' farm. They were coy: they didn't explain the word 'penal', and we were only seven. It was not until a year or so later, when one of the church deacons (translation: men who volunteer to pass out the 'Lord's Supper', which is sort of like Communion only with Welch's grape juice) got arrested, though he swore he didn't know the truck he bought was stolen, well, anyway, it wasn't until then that I put two and two together and realised why all those men who had been so nice to us over at the farm had been wearing denim shirts and jeans (translation: heavy blue troosers) rather than bib overalls (translation: the rural Southern farmer's working clothes, which look like this). These ladies were great teachers – but they were also tactful.

They were fairly tolerant, as well. While teaching us to write grammatical English, eschewing words like 'snuck' and 'ain't', they allowed us a certain orthographical latitude. After all, many of us had learned to read, not in kindergarten, which we had not attended, but in church, using the Authorised Version of the Bible. Which meant that we came to literacy believing that the word 'saviour' had a 'u' in it⁵.

We were allowed to use British spelling for two reasons:

• All the best people did, from the Apostle Paul to Sir Walter Scott, and
• Noah Webster (translation: the chauvinist dictionary-maker largely responsible for 'American' spelling) was a Yankee⁶.

Of course, we were too ignorant to use real British spelling. We relied on Shakespeare and such, and thought 'connexion' was okay, when everybody knows this is outdated. But then, I was born outdated, and have stayed that way ever since. I never knew anyone to get too het up (translation: exercised) about variant spellings, though, until I ran into Mrs McGillicuddy, the diminutive red-haired menace from Bah-stun. But that was in another country called Pittsburgh. Pittsburghers otherwise were cool with variant spellings, as long as you called rubber bands 'gum bands' and knew what it meant to 'redd up your room' (for translation, ask a Northern Irish Researcher).

Ah, the Mother Tongue. Delightful in all its variations. As long as you don't write 'snuck' in ink.

If you want to fuss about language, bring it on. Umlauts at 20 paces.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

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