Cover not available
Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 17:6 (2018) ► pp.812–830

Spelling-gate

Politics, propriety and power

ORCID logo | University of Liverpool
Back in 2009, the Labour British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was attacked for “bad spelling” in a condolence letter written personally by him to the mother of a soldier who died in combat, and publicised by The Sun newspaper. “Spelling” here acts as a leveller of hierarchical differences in the national political culture, with ruler and subject both publicly disciplined by the same standard language ideology. Previous research on orthography as social practice has tended to focus on deliberate manipulation of fixed spellings; this article extends the approach to unconventional spellings that have come about ‘by mistake’, and also widens it, to consider aspects of orthography other than spelling, focusing on the look of the Prime Minister’s handwriting. At issue, semiotically, are meanings such as ‘the personal touch’ and ‘respect’.
Keywords: orthography as social practice, handwriting, spelling, visual aspects of writing, sociolinguistics of writing, political culture, British political culture, media discourse, semiotics of writing, haptics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Context
  • 3.Theory
  • 4.The personal touch
  • 5.Disrespect
  • 6.Adding insult to injury
    • 6.1Insult
    • 6.2Injury
    • 6.3Victim
  • 7.Conclusions
    • 7.1Spelling-gate and the sociolinguistics of writing
    • 7.2Spelling-gate and British political culture: beyond partisanship
  • References
Published online: 14 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.17072.ric
References (54)
References
Alcindor, Yamiche and Julie H. Davis, 2017. “Soldier’s Widow Says Trump Struggled to Remember Sgt. La David Johnson’s Name”. New York Times, October 23 2017. [URL], Accessed March 26 2018.
Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. 2000. “Non-standard Spellings in Media Texts: The Case Of German Fanzines.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 4 (4): 514–33. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ashley, Jackie. 2009. “Comment and Debate: Let’s Tune in Again. Our MPs are Bringing Big Ideas Back: Just When we’d Given up on Politics, The Likes of Cameron and Miliband Start Having Real Debates of Vision and Importance.” The Guardian, November 16, 2009. Lexis Library.Google Scholar
Barton, David. 2007. Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Batty, David. 2009. “Commander Issued Helicopter Warning Weeks Before Afghanistan Death.” The Guardian, October 31, 2009. Lexis Library.Google Scholar
BBC. 2009. “Killed Officer Warned of Shortage.” BBC, 31 October 2009, [URL]. Accessed March 7 2018.
Carney, Edward. 1994. A Survey of English Spelling. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Corner, John. 2003. “Mediated Persona and Political Culture.” In Media and The Restyling of Politics, ed. by John Corner and Dick Pels, 67–84. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Corner, John, Kay Richardson, and Katy Parry. 2009. “Political Culture and the Mediascape: A British Case Study.” Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture 1 (3): 313–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davies, Eirlys E. 1987. “Eyeplay: On Some Uses of Nonstandard Spelling.” Language and Communication 7 (1): 47–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Drury, Ian, and James Chapman. 2009. “Brown: I Know How Loss Feels.” Daily Mail, November 11, 2009. Lexis Library.Google Scholar
Dunn, Tom Newton. 2009. “PM Couldn’t Even Get our Name Right: Soldier Mum’s Disgust at Condolence Letter.” The Sun, November 9, 2009. Lexis Library.Google Scholar
Dunn, Tom Newton, and Justine Smith. 2009. “‘Mr Brown, listen to me… I know every injury that my child sustained. My son could have survived but he bled to death’.” The Sun, November 10, 2009. Lexis Library.Google Scholar
Englebretson, Robert (ed.). 2007. Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, Susan L. 1998. “Drawing Fictional Lines: Dialect and Narrative in the Victorian Novel.” Style 32 (1): 1–17.Google Scholar
Gillen, Julia, and Nigel Hall. 2010. “Edwardian Postcards: Illuminating Ordinary Writing.” In Anthropology of Writing: Understanding Textually-Mediated Worlds, ed. by David Barton and Uta Papen, 169–189. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1981. “Footing.” In Forms of Talk, 124–159. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Goodman, Sharon. 1996. “Visual English.” In Redesigning English: New Texts, New Identities, ed. by Sharon Goodman and David Graddol, 38–73. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Holloway, Adam. 2009. “Put to Shame by a Dead Hero: Why we’ve All Got it So Wrong about the Taliban”. In Mail Online, 31 October 2009, [URL]. Accessed March 7 2018.
Hosenball, Mark. 2009. “Helicopter Shortages: A Senior British Officer Complains from Beyond the Grave.” Newsweek, November 2, 2009. [URL]. Accessed March 7 2018.
Ives, Sumner. 1950. “A Theory of Literary Dialect.” Tulane Studies in English 21: 137–182.Google Scholar
Jaffe, Alexandra. 2000. “Non-Standard Orthography and Non-Standard Speech.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 4 (4): 497–513. DOI logo.Google Scholar
. 2006. “Transcription in Practice: Nonstandard Orthography.” Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice 3 (2): 163–83. DOI logo.Google Scholar
. (ed.) 2009. Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jaffe, Alexandra, Jannis Androutsopoulos, Mark Sebba and Sally Johnson (eds.) 2012. Orthography as Social Action: Scripts, Spelling, Identity and Power. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kress, Gunther. 2000. Early Spelling: Between Convention and Creativity. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kretzschmar, William A. 2001. “Literary Dialect Analysis with Computer Assistance: An Introduction.” Language and Literature 10 (2): 99–110. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kress, Gunther. 2003. Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lillis, Theresa, and Carolyn McKinney. 2013. “The Sociolinguistics of Writing in a Global Context: Objects, Lenses, Consequences.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 17 (4): 415–39. DOI logo.Google Scholar
Longcamp, M., T. Tanskanen, and R. Hari. 2006. “The Imprint of Action: Motor Cortex Involvement in Visual Perception of Handwritten Letters.” NeuroImage 33 (2): 681–8. DOI logo.Google Scholar
Mangen, Anne. 2016. “What Hands May Tell us about Reading and Writing.” Educational Theory 66 (4): 457–77. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Queen, Robin, and Julie Boland. 2015. “‘I think your going to like me’: Exploring The Role of Errors in Email Messages on Assessments of Potential Housemates.” Linguistics Vanguard 1 (1): 283–94. DOI logo.Google Scholar
Richardson, Kay, John Corner and Katy Parry. 2013. Political Culture and Media Genre: Beyond the News. London: Palgrave MacMillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sassoon, Rosemary. 2007. Handwriting of the Twentieth Century. Bristol: Intellect Books Ltd.Google Scholar
Sebba, Mark. 2003. “Spelling Rebellion.” In Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities, eds. Jannis Androutsopoulos, Alexandra Georgakopoulou, 151–172. Amsterdam; Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2007a. Spelling and Society: The Culture and Politics of Orthography around the World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2007b. “Orthography as Social Practice.” In Spelling and Society, 26–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2010. “Spelling as a Social Practice.” In The Routledge Companion to English Language Studies, ed. by Janet Maybin and Joan Swann, 243–257. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
. 2012. “Orthography as Social Action: Scripts, Spelling, Identity and Power.” In Orthography as Social Action: Scripts, Spelling, Identity and Power, ed. by Alexandra Jaffe, Jannis Androutsopoulos, Mark Sebba and Sally Johnson, 1–19. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2015. “Iconisation, Attribution and Branding in Orthography.” Written Language and Literacy 18 (2): 208–27. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sharifi, Omar. 2012. “Orthography and Calligraphic Ideology in an Iranian-American Heritage School.” In Orthography as Social Action: Scripts, Spelling, Identity and Power, ed. by Alexandra Jaffe, Jannis Androutsopoulos, Mark Sebba and Sally Johnson, 225–254. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shipman, Tim. 2009. “Put to Shame by a Dead Hero.” Daily Mail, October 31, 2009. Lexis Library.Google Scholar
Spitzmüller, Jürgen. 2012. “Floating Ideologies: Metamorphoses of Graphic ‘Germanness’.” In Orthography As Social Action: Scripts, Spelling, Identity And Power, ed. by Alexandra Jaffe, Jannis Androutsopoulos, Mark Sebba and Sally Johnson, 225–254. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Street, Brian V. 1984. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Street, John. 2004. “Celebrity Politicians: Popular Culture And Political Representation.” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 6 (4): 35–52. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stewart, Heather. 2017. “Gordon Brown: ‘I didn’t show enough emotion to win the 2010 election’.” The Guardian, Monday 30 October 2017. [URL]. Accessed March 7 2018.
The Express. 2009. “Helicopter Shortage will Cost Lives Warned Colonel Killed by Taliban.” The Express, October 31, 2009. Lexis Library.Google Scholar
The Sun. 2009a. “Back our Boys.” The Sun, July 11, 2009. Lexis LibraryGoogle Scholar
. 2009b. “‘I can’t believe I’ve been brought down to the level of having an argument with the Prime Minister of my own country’; Mum at War: Full Transcript.” The Sun, November 10, 2009. Lexis Library.Google Scholar
van Leeuwen, Theo. 1999. Speech, Music, Sound. London: MacMillan Education. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2006. “Towards a Semiotics of Typography.” Information Design Journal: IDJ 14 (2) (01/01): 139–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Villa, Laura, and Rik Vosters. 2015. “Language Ideological Debates over Orthography in European Linguistic History.” Written Language and Literacy 18 (2): 201–7. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wong, Andrew D. 2013. “Brand Names and Unconventional Spelling: A Two-Pronged Analysis of the Orthographic Construction of Brand Identity.” Written Language and Literacy 16 (2): 115–45. DOI logoGoogle Scholar