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12/14/2004 Entry: "conquest against thru pt I"

A year-and-a-half ago I visited the Parthenon with my best friend Ian.

You might recall in class, he was the lucky guy who married the girl who told the "bachelor" story that I found so interesting but you all found so irrelevant. That's neither here nor there. Ian, or as certain circles write his name, EN, and I went to the Parthenon. Not the old and busted one in Athens, but the poured-concrete one write at home in Music City USA: the Parthenon.

Anyhoo, it was while browsing the many fine and intriguing exibits there (at that time they serendipitously had a two room gallery of Chuck Jones' cels--rapture) that I noticed a sign declaring museum hours:

Monday thru Friday: 8 thru 4 pm

or something like that. I immediately thought, "thru?!!" since when was it okay to write "thru"? I was taken aback, but EN (who I might add probably voted for Bush) saw no problem with the spelling.

But if you check with Webster's dictionary, it aquiescently affirms "thru" to be a valid alternate spelling of "through".

My mind reels. I still hear the shrill reprimands of Ms Howell, my first grade teacher, back when I was loathe to write any single extraneous letter needed to indicate a complete word. Other offenders were "tho" and "th'" and maybe "ruff".

In first grade, I had it tough. While all the motivated kids were busy filling up pages of capital "G"s and "A"s I was preoccupied with visualizing patterns on the desk, on the paper, in the corners of the classroom to plot out imaginary stars and clouds and rainbows. Ms H put a stop to that which lasted a few years, and I grudgingly added all the O-U-G-Hs to all the words that they deemed necessary.

But now, let us go back to Ben Webster. In the late 18th century, he published the first American dictionary. Ole Ben Webster: the common man's intellectual. Ben, the bon vivant. Ben, the misogynist. Ben, the drunk.

He did have one thing going for him. He reformed the spelling of the English language where it was due. Thanks to him, we spell "cheque" simply as "check" stateside. And a thousand other improvements. Some of his ideas, like "wimmen" didn't make the cut. And as far as I'm concerned, it's good that they didn't.

But it isn't like Webster's dictionary was simply another symbolic declaration of independence. After it's publishing, tens of thousands of copies sold in Great Britain alone. So there.

To be fair, this was the same atmosphere that simultaneously hatched the metric system in post-revolution France. The British still write "Cheque" and we still use the English inch.

Still, in all my "research", I have still not found a reconciliation as to why "thru" should be okay. The best I could do was this grudging entry here.

This is not over, dammit.