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THE WEEKEND - JULY 31 - AUGUST 6, 2013
Running For Office? Say It Right!
BY MICHAEL A. MILLER
[email protected]
Former Governor Elliot Spitzer did
something bad. He keeps doing it.
l’\ e seen him do it with my own eyes,
in public and on
television. It has
to stop.
He is mispro­
nouncing the
office for which
he is running.
People of Long
Island, we have
a proposed
merger of
Suffolk County's Comptroller and
Treasurer positions, a competitive
race for Nassau County Comptroller
and the whole Spitzer media circus.
That word. Comptroller, is going to
be coming up a lot, and if we don't
get together on this, it's going to be a
long, long summer and fall:
Kahn-Troh-Ler.
17th-century English intellectuals
were trying to tie their language to
the Latin and Greek they adored by
adopting classical spellings. They
mistakenly inserted a silent "p" into
the word "control," which actually
comes from French. They also
misinterpreted the roots of "iland,"
so now we have that silent "s" in
there. Don't get me started on the “d"
in Wednesday.
We eventually took some of those
silent letters out of English words,
but many stayed. 1 concede that
most of these spellings are here to
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stay. In 1989, New York Times col­
umnist William Safire urged his own
newspaper to recognize the reality of
the situation after 90 years of com­
plaining and go with Comptroller in
its headlines and copy. The Times
did. I notice that the Buffalo News
now uses City Comptroller instead of
City Controller as they doing in 2007,
when I last wrote about this subject.
New York is one of only five states
that elects a statewide "Comptroller."
California, Idaho, Maryland
and North Carolina elect a State
Controller (37 states elect a State
Auditor or State Treasurer or both).
In the private sector, "Controller" is
used almost universally. New York's
spelling is an oddity, and when it was
inserted into our 19th-century State
Constitutions, there were complaints
from people who worried, correcdy,
that it would ooze down into local
municipal charters, spreading spell­
ing chaos for generations.
Consider this, from a special
editorial published by the New York
Tribune in 1842:
"Yet how surprisingly has this
language been corrupted! Without
positive evidence before our
eyes, who could believe that the
American Congress, or an American
Legislature, should make such a
blunder as to write Comptroller,
when they mean Controller, and
continue the use of such nonsensical
words year after year, and age after
age?"
This editorial writer condemned
hack dictionary authors who copied
and spread the errors of sloppy,
unscientific European etymologists.
That writer was Noah Webster.
At left: Comptroller Candidate Howard
Weitzman. Above: Nassau County Comp­
troller George Maragos
At the turn of the 20th century,
there was a serious national move­
ment, partly funded by industrialist
Andrew Carnegie, to simplify the
spelling of hundreds of English
words. President Theodore Roosevelt
bought into this. In August 1906, he
sent the federal printing bureau a list
of 300 words that should be spelled
without all the silent letters. It helped
to spur acceptance of "program"
instead of "programme" and "labor"
instead of "labour." It also touched
off a conflict between Roosevelt and
the Comptroller of the Currency,
who insisted that he had to use the
spelling that was in the statute.
I accept that Noah and I lose and
Comptroller may remain an accept­
ed spelling. However, it has never,
ever, been acceptable to pronounce
the word as "komp-troller" or
"kump-troller." Even Safire never
gave in on that.
Mr. Spitzer isn't alone. At times he
has pronounced the title correctly,
and I suspect that he and other
candidates for Comptrollerships are
aping the misinformed interviewers
and moderators who introduce
them. They don't want to come
across as strident, but maybe if they
took a few seconds to politely make
the correction, they just might come
across as correct.
Michael Miller has worked in state
and local government. He lives in
New Hyde Park. Please note that the
email address for this column has
changed to [email protected].