Noah Webster did a great deal to establish principles, and
bring the spelling of as many words as possible to conform with these
principles and with such analogies as seemed fairly well established.
But other dictionary-makers have set up their ideas against his,
and we have a conflict of authorities. If for any reason one finds
himself spelling a word differently from the world about him,
he begins to say, "Well, that is the spelling given in Worcester,
or the Century, or the Standard, or the new Oxford." So the word
"authority" looms big on the horizon; and we think so much about
authority, and about different authorities, that we forget
to look for principles, as Mr. Webster would have us do.
Another reason for neglecting rules and principles is that the lists of
exceptions are often so formidable that we get discouraged and exclaim,
"If nine tenths of the words I use every day are exceptions to the
rules, what is the use of the rules anyway!" Well, the words which
constitute that other tenth will aggregate in actual numbers far more
than the common words which form the chief part of everyday speech,
and as they are selected at random from a vastly larger number,
the only possible way to master them is by acquiring principles,
consciously or unconsciously, which will serve as a key to them.
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