Game Ideas Un limited: Orthography

  I often pass through the small town of Quinton, New Jersey, as it stands between my present home and a number of significant destinations, the most important of which is Hudock's, which is not only an excellent custard stand but a summer hamburger joint that is missed when it closes for the winter.  This is not just my opinion; last year the reopening made front page headlines in the county paper, which as parochial as it is in its coverage certainly had its finger on the pulse of the populous on that call.

  Recently, however, there's been construction around the bridge, and I've had to slow down and be more aware of my surroundings as I cross it.  Hence I again noticed the sign that marks it, Cuinton's Bridge, as an historic landmark.  It seems that there was a battle fought here during the American Revolutionary War in which colonials defended the bridge such that the British could not cross it.  Until long after I'd moved into the area I was unaware of any such battle, but it apparently was significant enough that it, like the not too distant Seven Stars Tavern in Woodstown, are considered important enough to be marked as historic landmarks.  Looking down into the narrow and docile river that flows beneath the bridge, I find some difficulty imagining that the British needed whatever tiny bridge here was long ago replaced by the current short bit of steel grate that spans water; but then, it's Salem County, which is almost all swamp, so I imagine they had some concern about leaving the roads with heavy equipment.  I'm sure there's a game idea in there somewhere, but it's not the one I'm after at the moment.

  Perhaps you noticed that Cuinton's Bridge is in the town of Quinton.  That is neither a misprint on the one hand nor a coincidence on the other.  Both were named for the same person.  Yet the spelling of the town and that of the bridge do not match.  It reminds me that orthography can be very tricky; the way we spell things is not always the same.

  I became aware of this back in college, when I was studying linguistics.  In my researches for a project on old English pronunciation, I happened upon a quote from Chaucer.  I regret that I no longer have the quote; but I know the gist.  He was complaining about his scribes, who put his words to paper.  It seems that when they wrote his words, they wrote them the way they pronounced them, and that with those spellings the words did not always rhyme.  This concept is completely alien to modern readers.  We are quite accustomed to the idea that there is a correct spelling for every word, and you must spell it correctly.  (And, thanks in large part to the vowel shift undergone since our language was written, we somehow have come to accept words which "rhyme to the eye" because they no longer rhyme to the ear.)  I know when and why that happened; for the moment, accept that it was not always so.  Chaucer wrote words the way he spoke them.  Others in his time who spoke differently also wrote differently.  English was a phonetic language, at least as written.  Every letter on the page had a pronunciation, and if you read the words as written you would always pronounce them correctly, even if you had never seen them before.

  I said I knew how this changed.  It happened because of a major advance in technology:  Gutenberg's movable type printing press.  Prior to Gutenberg, written language was strictly in the care of scholars, who read and copied the few books which were available as an artistic endeavor and a labor of love.  After Gutenberg, technicians took over the preservation of written language, and treated it as a machine which had to be properly maintained to function.  However words were written in the authoritative sources--primarily Shakespeare and King James--that was the correct way to write them.  We locked our spelling in to the way words were then pronounced, and although our pronunciation has shifted drastically since then, our spelling has not kept pace.

  Yet to some degree it has.  There are separate spelling traditions.  English spelling is different from American, and there are nuances of difference between different British classes, or different American regions.  Further, there are nuances of errors, things individual writers always do incorrectly with a consistency that marks them.

  How do you use this in a game?

  The first thing that comes to mind is misdirection.  Consider the possibility that the players might be told, orally, that they need to find Quinton Jefferson.  If they meet someone who is introduced to them as Siege or even Cage, it might be some time before they realized that this name was short for C. J. or K. J., and even longer before they recognized that those were the initials they should have been seeking.

  There are also possibilities in the differences in usage, particularly if you are in a game in which written messages are common.  Instructions from a superior, taunts from an adversary, help from a mysterious benefactor might all be in written form, delivered to the players as to the characters on paper.  This can be used in several ways.

  I believe it was Inspector Endeavor Morse who once identified a suicide note as a fraud based on the spelling.  The writer had gone to a great deal of trouble to make it seem as if it were written by someone uneducated, including making certain spelling and grammar errors.  They were the wrong errors, Morse observed--they were mistakes that an uneducated person would not make, but an educated person would expect.  Further, in more than one place the writer used the ise ending on words preferred by the British upper class where the commoner would have used the ize ending.  The note was written by someone educated and wealthy, attempting to feign the guise of someone coarse or common.

  That may be a bit difficult.  A simpler idea would be to establish a pattern of regular errors over the course of regular correspondence.  I know someone who writes dose when he means does so persistently that when I see the same mistake made in unsigned e-mails and anonymous forum posts I wonder whether they're from him.  You've seen most of the common egregious errors.  Alot isn't a word (my spellchecker tries to fix it even as I try to write it).  Theirs and there's get confused a great deal.  It's is not possessive.  The affect/effect and accept/except confusions are made all the time.  There are a wealth of unofficial abbreviations some people use when they write.  If you build up a familiar pattern for a particular writer, you can then deliver a note purporting to be from the same author but without the characteristic errors, and see if the players realize from the absence of mistakes that this one is a forgery.

  It's a small thing, and you won't have many occasions to use it, but that's all the more reason to do so when you can.  A new trick that the players haven't previously encountered may be just the thing to create interest in the old game.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.