You Can't Use a Spelling Trick to Fool God

This blog being about words, we need to define our subject. You may think, “But everyone knows what a word is.” Not so

When I was a freshman in a Western Civilization lecture, my eyes happened to wander to the notebook of young coed as she penned a note that included the word “G-d.”

When the bell rang I asked, “Why did you spell “God” that way?”

She answered, “The Bible forbids us to write the name of the Lord.”

Being a wise-ass then—as some people say I still am—I replied, “Won’t God know what you meant. After all, ‘G-d’ is just another way of writing ‘God.’”

“Go to hell,” she said. Obviously my classmate had no clue about the true nature of words.

“But she was just a student,” you might argue. “This blog is for sophisticated adults, who aren’t so naïve.”

Yeah? Not long ago, my hometown newspaper quoted a local politician as saying, “I don’t give a f**k what people think about…”

In a letter to the editor I asked, “Why did you spell ‘fuck’ with asterisks? Isn’t the standard spelling ‘fuck”?

The editor printed my letter—courageously with “fuck” spelled correctly—and then noted that the asterisks were used to avoid offending prudish readers. I wondered: Wouldn’t prudish readers—who are as intelligent as the rest of us— recognize “f**k” as just a variant spelling of “fuck”?

So what have we learned? A word is an arbitrary symbolic structure that points to something outside itself. “Air” for example, refers to the stuff you’re breathing in and out as you read this blog. Spell it “ayer” and it still keeps you alive. “Blog” refers to the words you’re reading as you breathe the air in and out. Little is changed if I spell it “blogg.”

If you want a famous example: When NAKED AND THE DEAD was first published, censors printed each instance of “fuck” as “fug.”

I say, “Fug that.” Gertrude Stein might have put it more delicately:
A word is a word is a word.