No More Frater Trafic

At the height of its power and influence in the 1930s, Colonel Robert R. McCormick's Chicago Tribune feared nothing. Not even the English language. With the help of a scholarly staffer named James O'Donnell Bennett, McCormick set out in the Trib to change Chicagoland's spelling habits. "Simplified spelling" made its debut on Jan. 28, 1934, and schoolteachers all over the Middle West found themselves fighting to save pupils from such Tribisms as hocky, fantom and definitly. Freighters became fraters and sheriffs sherifs. A Trib editorial proclaimed that there was "rime and reason for every alteration."

The Tribune insisted that three-quarters of its reader mail favored simplified spelling, but a significant segment of the readership came to feel the self-proclaimed "world's greatest newspaper" was rather the world's gratest. By the time McCormick died in 1955, the list of simplified words, which once ran as high as 80, was already shrinking. Reluctantly, the Trib shot down the sherif and later sank the frater. "Readers," sighs Editor Clayton Kirkpatrick, "wondered if Tribune editors knew how to spell." The latest style book retains only a few relics of the Bennett era, most of them now widely accepted: tho, thru, analog. Prime reason for the return to standard spelling is to bring Trib style closer to that of wire services, most other papers, and current teaching in the U.S. journalism schools.

The Tribune is also restoring capitalization that was swept away years ago by McCormick. For decades, the paper's "down" style decreed orient, soviet, communism. The only medal or memorial allowed upper case was the Purple Heart. Kirkpatrick explains that the return to "up" style was made "as a service to the reader, so he can scan a story rapidly, and important things such as the name of an organization will stand out."

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