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The Arrangement of Letters
Lieutenant is one of my favourites. No matter how you choose to pronounce the word—properly: "leftenant"; or like those damn yankees: "lootenant"—it does not help a scrap in spelling it. English is a language chock full of inconsistent spellings and pronunciations. Nothing is ever simple.
Which is cool. I'm a contrarian. It's kind of nice that my native tongue is deeply contrarian also. Bernard Shaw's famous observation that fish could also be spelled "ghoti"—the gh from rough, the o from women and the ti from consternation—greatly pleases me and many many other people though, naturally, not everyone.
My Spanish teacher in San Miguel, Alejandra, was always saying one of the great things about Spanish which makes it so easy to learn (hah! I say) is that how you say is most often how you spell. But it's not easy if you're a native English-speaker for whom spelling has always been a matter of guessing, not listening. Alejandra's formula goes against the grain of my training, so when I'm writing in Spanish I often end up adding double letters and random vowels. Hard to undo many years of spelling guesswork.
I love the anarchy of English. It makes me happy, never knowing if my guesses as to spelling and pronunciation are going to be anywhere near the mark. For those who insist it isn't anarchic, that a good philologist can show you the rhyme and reason of every spelling—"gh" as "f", that would be from German borrowings; "ieu" as "oo", blame the French—it doesn't matter, most of us don't know that, and there are always those pesky exceptions. Hardly any rules in English don't have them, and most exceptions come sans a handy little ryhme, er, sorry rhyme, like "i before e except after c".
I've always known I wasn't alone in the randomness of my spelling. Indeed, compared to the majority of folk I'm an okay speller. But the blessed world-wide web and its tool of thus far unsurpassed usefulness—Google—has put it beyond doubt. I ego-surf. (Yes, I know. It's bad. I plan to stop any day now.) I type my name into google and watch how many thousands (oh, okay, mere hundreds) of times my name is mentioned. Until recently I've been spelling my name correctly. For some bizarre reason it hadn't occured to me that there would be other hits lurking in the ether disguised by people's inability to spell my name. (Spell it just as it's prounounced, people. Yeah, yeah, I know. Not very helpful.) It's not like I've never noticed that some folk freak when confronted with names of more than two syllables. It's not like I haven't seen my name misspelt before. It's not like I can spell all surnames of more than two syllables.
So I started randomly misspelling my name and—lo and behold—in addition to my twin brother, Justin Larbalestier, I discovered several other dopplegangers running around under the following guises (some of them conjured into existence by friends of mine): Labalestier, Larbalastier, Larbalester, Larbelestier, Larbestier (thanks, Mr Berzerk), and Larblastier. I'm especially fond of that last one. If only it were my real name. How appropriate that the author of The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, whose cover depicts a woman using her powerful eye-rays to zap through her male foe's helmet, should have the name LarBLASTier. Too beautiful.
The discovery caused me to lose all sympathy for Scott, whose last name, Westerfeld, is misspelt far more frequently than mine. Most people confronted with the polysyllabic horror of my surname are so scared they'll bugger it up that they check. Not so with Scott's. They're without a moment's doubt that they should add another letter. Of course, it's Westerfield, not Westerfeld. But at least the misspellings are always the same, so when Scott googles himself he only need do it twice. Lucky bastard.
Sydney, 12 April 2004
© 2004 Justine Larbalestier
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