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Memoirs of a Superfluous Fan, 1944
Page 11
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during the formative spelling years was a Century dictionary rather than the more standard Webster. Another cause was my advanced reading in my later elementary school grades. As I poured through semi-technical books on science and chemistry, not to mention the Wells and Verne's novels, I naturally came across great quantities of words which my ordinary school studies would never encounter until the last years of high school. When, in putting these words back into my own sentances, I spelled them as I THOUGHT they were spelled, the results were garbled; hilariously so, I may add. I still maintain the british system, since my earliest readings were british science and chemistry textbooks, and, of course, all the Weels and the Jules Verne translations, are in british letter. It became obvious after the first issue of IMAGINATION! that my ideas were a bit too grandois for my technical ability to carry them through. For this reason it was imperative that the club come to the rescue of the magazine before it was too late. Further, as Hodgkins was and is an adict to rigid punctuality and order, the magazine not only had to be letter-perfect, but it must come out on a monthly schedual, and for this last requirement, the hektograph was considered too ancient a machine for the purpose. Whereas the first issue of IMAGINATION! had largely been between Ackerman, Morojo, and myself, the entire club no burst forth with ideas an suggestions. In fact, all through October and November 1937 the club dickered and bickered over IMAGINATION!, though the contributions of such skilled cynics as Kuttner, Lewis, Fox, and Hodgkins made the entire affair a little less than delectable. Among the major battles was the Chaper vs. Ackerman re: simplified spelling. This is a matter on which I have always been phlegmatic. Perhaps I am a reactionary, but there has been one tendency about the club which has deeply irritated me the many years I associated with it. I do not nor have not at any time, been able to adopt any but a smirking distaste for simplified spelling, Esperanto nicknames, and the more rabid scientifictional abbreviations. One bit of hell which I raised and kept raising for months was the changing of the club's name to the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society on April 4, 1940. Perhaps due to my own faulty spelling, I have always stood in awe of a language which was so cantankerous and wrapped-up in itself that it blithly bowled over in rapid succession every conceivable sound and sane concept of phonology. This feeling of accomplishment at being able to spell english at all was strengthened after my dialatory into such phonetic languages as German, Dutch, Russian, Greek, Finnish, and even French, which though not phonetic, is more regular than the King's language. I have always had a sane respect for language, and such prostitutions as Morojo, Fojak, Tobojo, stfan, stfette, etc., have merely called upa feeling of contempt for persons whose minds were so unstable that they had to try and make their observations interesting by googoo tricks under the guise of neo-modernism. I can see the legitimate use of scientifiction, a term I use myself, and I have accepted stf. as a properly justified abbreviation of the same, but I do not pronounce the abbreviation "stuff", or whatever you will. This mad desire to warp and spice-up every possible word change on the part of a large faciton of the local group has galled me for years. THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1937 was Ackerman's mad desire for simplifying the english language. His rabid attempts became virtually out of control. There was editorial friction from the first as I flatly, at that early age, refused to dummy the magazine in his jargon...and Forrie was equally insistant that simplified spelling be only one of the many unique things about IMAGINATION! Even
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during the formative spelling years was a Century dictionary rather than the more standard Webster. Another cause was my advanced reading in my later elementary school grades. As I poured through semi-technical books on science and chemistry, not to mention the Wells and Verne's novels, I naturally came across great quantities of words which my ordinary school studies would never encounter until the last years of high school. When, in putting these words back into my own sentances, I spelled them as I THOUGHT they were spelled, the results were garbled; hilariously so, I may add. I still maintain the british system, since my earliest readings were british science and chemistry textbooks, and, of course, all the Weels and the Jules Verne translations, are in british letter. It became obvious after the first issue of IMAGINATION! that my ideas were a bit too grandois for my technical ability to carry them through. For this reason it was imperative that the club come to the rescue of the magazine before it was too late. Further, as Hodgkins was and is an adict to rigid punctuality and order, the magazine not only had to be letter-perfect, but it must come out on a monthly schedual, and for this last requirement, the hektograph was considered too ancient a machine for the purpose. Whereas the first issue of IMAGINATION! had largely been between Ackerman, Morojo, and myself, the entire club no burst forth with ideas an suggestions. In fact, all through October and November 1937 the club dickered and bickered over IMAGINATION!, though the contributions of such skilled cynics as Kuttner, Lewis, Fox, and Hodgkins made the entire affair a little less than delectable. Among the major battles was the Chaper vs. Ackerman re: simplified spelling. This is a matter on which I have always been phlegmatic. Perhaps I am a reactionary, but there has been one tendency about the club which has deeply irritated me the many years I associated with it. I do not nor have not at any time, been able to adopt any but a smirking distaste for simplified spelling, Esperanto nicknames, and the more rabid scientifictional abbreviations. One bit of hell which I raised and kept raising for months was the changing of the club's name to the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society on April 4, 1940. Perhaps due to my own faulty spelling, I have always stood in awe of a language which was so cantankerous and wrapped-up in itself that it blithly bowled over in rapid succession every conceivable sound and sane concept of phonology. This feeling of accomplishment at being able to spell english at all was strengthened after my dialatory into such phonetic languages as German, Dutch, Russian, Greek, Finnish, and even French, which though not phonetic, is more regular than the King's language. I have always had a sane respect for language, and such prostitutions as Morojo, Fojak, Tobojo, stfan, stfette, etc., have merely called upa feeling of contempt for persons whose minds were so unstable that they had to try and make their observations interesting by googoo tricks under the guise of neo-modernism. I can see the legitimate use of scientifiction, a term I use myself, and I have accepted stf. as a properly justified abbreviation of the same, but I do not pronounce the abbreviation "stuff", or whatever you will. This mad desire to warp and spice-up every possible word change on the part of a large faciton of the local group has galled me for years. THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1937 was Ackerman's mad desire for simplifying the english language. His rabid attempts became virtually out of control. There was editorial friction from the first as I flatly, at that early age, refused to dummy the magazine in his jargon...and Forrie was equally insistant that simplified spelling be only one of the many unique things about IMAGINATION! Even
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