Every once in a while, more often when I am writing a thesis, I get on a rant about Microsoft. This one came up when my erstwhile editor flagged "biassed" as misspelled. Why did she flag it? Because MS put that wiggly red line under it. And why did they flag it? Because I violated the "Rule" of American English editors. Who are these "American English editors"? Nobody knows. I mean, in France they have the "Academie Francaise" and apparently, many countries have a body of graybeards whose job it is to admit or deny words. From Afrikaans to Yoruba, there is a committee who fixes the spelling. But glaringly missing from this list is anything English. Or American for that matter.

So who gets to make up the rules that Microsoft uses for its "English spelling"? Their committee on "Natural Language Group". And who does this group answer to? Apparently no one but their bosses--which I suppose might still be Bill Gates. But no one can tell, because the spelling dictionary file, Mssp3en.lex, is locked in a proprietary format. We might surmise, however, that the now-discontinued Encarta Encyclopedia and Dictionary, which has been spun off to Webster's International since 2006, might be the source of the spelling regulations. And who listens to Webster International on this subject?

Websters' major clients and partners in the digital and publishing worlds have included — in addition to our extensive contracts as a preferred vendor for Microsoft/MSN — Channel 4, Cranium, The Economist, The New York Times, World Book, Dorling Kindersley, Hachette Livre, Harcourt, Rodale and Macmillan

So the cabal has a long reach into the publishing business. We note the presence of "The Gray Lady" as well as two large book publishers. The significance of these for-profit companies will shortly become apparent.

So what in particular is the reason for rejecting "biassed" as a proper spelling? Microsoft won't say, of course, but after some strenuous sleuthing, here is what "The English Spelling Society" says about superior American spelling:

With phonics now officially acknowledged by the British education authorities as central to literacy acquisition even in such a wayward alphabetic system as English, Britain should also acknowledge most American forms as better suited to the phonic learner than their British counterparts.

And here is how the spelling society views the problem that initiated this blog--the doubling or lack of doubling of final consonants:

One of the most troublesome features of English spelling is the lack of reliable rules to tell us when to double consonants. One often cited rule has it that, when a base word ending in a single consonant letter adds a suffix beginning with a vowel, the consonant is doubled if its preceding vowel is both short and stressed (eg, commit has TT in committing); but where these precise conditions do not apply, the final consonant is not doubled (eg, single T in commitment since the suffix begins with a consonant, and in inviting since the preceding vowel of invite is long and the T is not final in the base form, and in visiting, since the vowel immediately preceding the T in visit is unstressed). This rule, which is generally accepted by both American and British spelling conventions is in itself too complex to be easily mastered, but British (not American) spelling aggravates the difficulty with numerous exceptions. The most widespread pattern of exceptions affects verbs ending in an unstressed vowel plus single L, such as travel.

An editor, who must have been reading from a resource I haven't found on the web, once told me that the American approach to doubling was to use the shorter spelling if it did not already exist in the dictionary. So for example, "bus" plural goes to "buses" rather than "busses" because there is no item "buse" in the dictionary. On the other hand, "fuss" does not go to "fuses" because there is a "fuse" in the dictionary. (What this rule does with "buss" is obviously a bit unclear--Microsoft certainly rejects "busses".)

Well let me clear up what the Spelling Society finds so difficult to understand. The spelling rule for doubling really is quite simple, and applies to ancient Hebrew and Korean as well. There are two kinds of syllables, closed and open. A closed syllable ends with a consonant, whereas an open syllable ends with a vowel. Closed syllables have short vowels, open syllables have long vowels. Therefore one doubles the final consonant in order to "protect" a short vowel. Fuse --> fuses, and bus --> busses, according to this rule. The application is entirely phonetic, and does not require knowledge of a lexicon to be applied. Thus the first statement of the Spelling Society contradicts the later statement--because shorter spellings are no longer phonetic.

In fact, "if two spellings are possible, choose the shorter form of the spelling" is a recursive statement, because it suggests that this rule is not being applied if there is a shorter version. Nor can it be applied consistently because then there will be no second spelling option.

So instead of going by the sound and the syntax of the root word, we are now dependent on a dictionary to figure out the right spelling. This is like going back from phonetic spelling to Chinese characters, or like going from the Phoenician alphabet to the Egyptian hieroglyphics. This undoes 3000 years of convention, and you call this progress?

What if tomorrow someone decides to convert a verb to a noun, "Them cops were 'busing me, man." When do we go back and change the spelling of the noun converted to a verb "Bussing"?

Soon it will require an educated elite, possessing the latest in Microsoft software to tell us peons how to spell. Sort of the way hieroglyphics died out with the last Egyptian priest in 300 AD. Bad spellers will be ostracized, discriminated against, prejudiced. I had a friend tell me that my double consonant on "biassing" was going to get my resume rejected!

And fear will drive us all toward buying Microsoft products to check our spelling. Which, of course, will change arbitrarily as they "improve" the spelling the way the spelling society dictates. This will necessitate buying the latest in Microsoft software, lest we be discovered to be using last year's spelling. Like Winston Smith in 1984, we will spend our lives editing more and more dictionaries for Microsoft, because he who controls the language, controls the people.

Stop! Spellers of the world, unite! Discard your Microsoft Word and your Merriam-Webster dictionaries, you have nothing to lose but your chains!