Gungs & Boms

In a lengthy letter to the London Times, George Bernard Shaw told the world what was wrong with the atom bomb. It was misspelled.

G.B.S. was harping on a favorite string. He had promised to will $80,000 to anyone with a plan to make English "economic." But lately he had been appalled anew at the discovery that he could write "bomb" only 18 times a minute and "bom" 23 times. Stormed Shaw: "The extra sign is entirely senseless, it not only wastes the writer's time, but suggests an absurd mispronunciation, as if the word 'gun' were to be spelt 'gung.' "

"Phoneticians have wasted a century raising an empty laugh over the spelling of cough. They have never knocked into our heads the simple fact that a letter saved in spelling is saved not once but millions of times. Millions of hours [are] now wasted in a sort of devil worship of Dr. Johnson."

He himself, he surmised, is the "only phonetician, economist and man of letters who realizes how much money there is in a British alphabet with which every sound in our speech can be written with one graphic symbol." Shaw appealed to the British Government "as a labor government" to do something about it.

In Manhattan, Barnard College's Philologist William Cabell Greet agreed with Shaw generally, but didn't think any democratic government--U.S. or British--could get anywhere against the sentiment that people attach to spelling. Said he: "If the Japanese had dictated peace, they might have been able to dictate a simplified spelling. . . ."

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