Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, August 11, 1995 TAG: 9508110024
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A group of language watchdogs out there is just waiting for a chance to show you the error of your lays.
The Society for the Preservation of English Language and Literature.
SPELL, for short.
"It's a labor of love," explained SPELL President Richard Dowis, a semi-retired journalist and public relations executive from Georgia. "Individually we can do very little, but collectively we can do a lot."
SPELL was begun 10 years ago by Californian Stephen Manhard. "He was just so upset by so many abuses and misuses of the language," Dowis said. "After he retired, he started sending out little notes to people."
Manhard's notes were the origin of the Goof card - now sent by SPELL's 1,600 members to grammar and syntax molesters throughout the media and elsewhere.
It isn't that Dowis is a language Puritan. He realizes language is a messy business - forever mingling, mating, mutating and evolving.
Still, he and other SPELL members do not believe people should simply make up the rules as they go along. "It's a question of regulating the pace of change," Dowis said. "The language is better for the resistance."
A few of his personal grievances: confusing "lie" with "lay," "infer" with "imply" "flaunt" with "flout."
"I think it's inexcusable," Dowis said of all of the above.
Despite all their efforts, he conceded, the consciousness-raising goes slowly.
"It's like spitting in the ocean," he said, when asked whether SPELL had made a difference. "But I think so. We've made a lot of people more conscious of it."
by CNB