comme l’ecrivain

My friend Martin has sent me this:

“I was reflecting on changes in spelling even among the literate. A couple of weeks ago a Guardian columnist referred to churned up, partially melted snow as ‘sludge’. I would use slush. Perhaps she/they as a younger person equates this with a  sugary coloured, fruit free confectionery. Then in Michelle Obama’s ‘Becoming’ the author has an image of herself as FLOTUs floating serenely swan like, while her legs below the water are ‘pedaling’ frantically (yes, I think she spelt it with one ‘l’, and I am not going back to check). Here, I would haver used paddling, although one must remember the swan headed pedalo’s on Lake Annecy (and are they pedalo’s or guided swans in the grotto at the nutty Bavarian King Ludwig’s castle at Neue Schwanstein?).

Anyway, this reflection led me to the mis-spelling of my family name that is now more common that the correct spelling. Hemingway with two ‘mm’s. I cannot bring myself to write it. It is a variant, although less common than the proper spelling, so my usual response to those making the error that it is ‘only miss-spelt in obituaries, when you can’t complain’ is a little inexact.

The problem is that the name of a not entirely pleasant American writer and Nobel prize winner has dropped from the popular conscience where it had sat in the fifties, sixties and seventies – an American Studies day at the University of Sussex in 1970 looked at ‘Fiesta (The Sun also rises), and that was the first Hemingway I had read, although a copy of ‘The Essential Hemingway’ stood life affirmingly on my bookshelf.

Working in France in the seventies, when I gave my name the person on the other side of the desk would say ‘comme l’ecrivain’ and the name would be correctly spelt.

Our Maggie, an actress I understand, and our Wayne, something in the rag trade, do not seem to have managed the same nominal imposition, and that is something to regret. I am barely famous in my own backyard.

It is I accept how language grows, although I still cannot accept the ugly ‘impacted’ replacing ‘affected’, or ‘impacts’ replacing ‘affects’ – an ugliness imposed by those who could not tell their ‘effect’ from their ‘affect’ I suspect. And don’t get me started on ‘less’ and ‘fewer’.

But life would not be the same without old people complaining that things are not the same as when they were young, so at least this complaint is life-affirming, as Granny Weatherwax would put it ‘I ain’t dead yet!’”

Thanks Martin