If you close your eyes and hover around long enough in the basement of God’s cruelest architectural disaster, Dwinelle Hall on the UC-Berkeley campus, sometimes, just sometimes, you can detect the delicate aroma of stale urinal cakes gently tickling the sensitive hairs in your nostrils, as if to say, “Hey there buckaroo, while you’re in the neighborhood, why not have a look at the nondescript pictures gracing these magnificent walls?”

And maybe, just maybe, if you had sufficient time, inclination, or sheer boredom to do that, you might notice a set of faded documents detailing Benjamin Franklin’s failed proposal to abandon the state of the English language for a simplified phonetic version. Removing c, j, q, w, x, and y from the alphabet, Franklin replaced them with six new letters representing sounds like ch and sh. This, he felt, would alleviate all the guesswork when it came to learning and writing English since everything would be spelled like it sounded.

Now hold that thought for a moment. Benny boy has a vision he would like to share with you. Somewhere out there, perhaps in a parallel universe, there is a world free from the horror of gawky, snaggle-toothed children peddling Hooked on Phonics through the wee hours of the morning on TV. There is a world in which punk kids can graffito-tag the names of life-threatening medical conditions on public property without having to consult a dictionary. There is a world in which little Timmy can effortlessly forge excuse notes for why he was “absint” from school for four consecutive days without arousing undue suspicion from Ms. Pubert.

Sure Ben, maybe “phonetisizing” the language would fly two-hundred years ago, but on the eve of the 21st century it’s hard to get anyone to give a damn about anything, and rearranging the language ain’t going to net anyone a profit, so no luck there. And then there’s the old coffee mug adage that berates us like any good, authoritarian hick of a father: “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” Tampering with a proven system can only lead to problems down the road, right? So how come everywhere we go these days we see something misspelled? Now, I’m not talking about fortune cookies or the occasional newspaper misprint, I’m talking about deliberately omitted letters or substitution of other letters where they clearly don’t belong. I’m talking about words containing 2’s (“2night”) and plural nouns ending in z (“warez”).

Just as differing air temperatures in two adjacent rooms will spontaneously balance each other out, some people also believe the trend of misspelling emerged as a sort of natural counter to English’s innumerable stylistic quirks. The frequency with which the public is subjected to them suggest a premeditated effort on the part of society at large, but the question remains as to what purpose these deviations serve. Are they just hip linguistic statements or is there some serious, legitimate foundation behind them?

We happen to live in a society that manages to exploit every trendy gimmick it can get its sweaty palms on, whether it be the “hey-cool-I-want-some” factor behind sea monkeys, the bandwagon-esque hype of friendship bracelets, or the mindlessness of the pet rock. Likewise, deliberate misspellings on products and businesses presumably were, at least in the beginning, the result of two unquestioned rules of marketing:

1) Distinction : Stoop to any level to make the product stand out. The more unusual it looks at first glance, the more likely it is to pique the consumer’s interest— even if it makes the company look bad. Personally, I believe that if Fat Slice changed its name to Phat Slice, sales would at least triple. Other examples: Kwik Kopy, Valu-Pak.

2) Economics : Cut corners in any way possible— as some pioneering wiseguy
discovered years ago, it always saves on overhead. Extra letters on signs or neon lights require an additional investment. Logic dictates an abbreviated sign, since it can still get the point across without all the needless expense and pretense of correct spelling. Why else would Telegraph Avenue’s Hi Times be spelled like that? To dispel any affiliation with High Times magazine or drug paraphernalia? No, it’s because of the sign. Or how about: Drive-Thru, All-Nite, Comix.

Ask any student of the Haas School of Business— nothing moves inventory faster than sex and deliberately misspelled words. Need more proof? If you peruse local bicycle stores, you’ll see that there is a successful maker of bike-messenger bags named, cryptically enough, “Timbuk2.” What would possess a company based in San Francisco to name themselves after a city in the African nation of Mali? The company website (www.timbuk2.com) is suspiciously tightlipped on the subject, but the foregone conclusion is that the 2 is the driving force behind the company’s success.

In the good ol’ days of illiteracy, misspelling was mostly limited to the sphere of commerce. Then at some point during the mid-1980’s, a semi-sapient media-whore who would later revamp himself as an androgynous man-child with an unpronounceable symbol for a name developed a perverse habit of throwing inexplicable 2’s, 4’s, and U’s into his song titles (“I Would Die 4 U,” “Nothing Compares 2 U”). Prince spat in the face of conventional English, relegating himself to an eerie fantasy world of sexual innuendo and expurgated verse.

Similarly, fifth graders and those with comparable educations had a good, hearty, laugh at the “establishment” in 1988 when seminal vomit-rock icons Van Halen released the oh-so-cleverly-titled 0U812. When questioned about the release, one prominent MIT University linguistics professor admitted that while he found the album to be a “tasty platter of bitchin’ guitar licks,” the title could only be described as “monstrously irresponsible” and “abominable, just abominable.” In retrospect, it seems unthinkable that artists like Prince or Van Halen possessed the mental capacity to unleash an orchestrated Trojan horse that in little more than 10 years would multiply like some unstoppable mutant bitch-virus threatening total social Götterdämmerung. Surely no one at the time anticipated that hoards of impressionable fans would grow up harboring the same “fuck you and your fancy book-learnin’ ” attitude propelled by their big-haired heroes.

The so-called Internet Revolution didn’t exactly do much to contain the rapidly spreading the phonetic movement. In fact, when Internet chat rooms and instant online pagers such as ICQ, itself shorthand for “I seek you,” blew open the flood gates for bastardized English, stunned intellectuals across the country collectively gasped in horror. With the onset of virtually instantaneous transmissions of dialogue between parties on different ends of the planet, coupled with the fact that a huge amount of attention was suddenly being focused on the medium of written language, it was obvious that, in the words of an anonymous source, “some bad shit was going to go down.” Why, even as you read this, pressing information (“I no where u live,” “who r u”) is travelling throughout the four corners of the cyberglobe faster than a diesel-powered hoverplane, spreading gutter versions of every known language like some international venereal disease.

And who do we have to blame for this trend? The guy who invented the QWERTY system, that’s who! Maybe if Christopher Latham Sholes hadn’t arranged the letters on the keyboard to minimize efficiency (thereby preventing jamming on 19th century typewriters) people wouldn’t feel compelled to save the extra nanosecond required to type two more letters. But at least we have seized the opportunity to plaster the sign of the apocalypse “:) ” everywhere. Within the last week, I’ve seen that figure carved into the walls of two public bathrooms, a desk in Dwinelle, and the cooling tower of a nuclear power plant. And if that weren’t enough, a disturbing recent study states that the instances of students chiseling “Slayer” or scrawling “call 981-3431 for a good time” on school property are in an alarming state of decline.

So what does the future bring for this little “situation?” Assuming that the current rate of depletion follows an exponential curve and is compounded quarterly at a rate of 8.275%, the English language will be completely bereft of words by the year 2074. Thankfully, history has taught us that every trend will eventually usher in a violent backlash, when public tolerance finally reaches its breaking point. So as technical writing advances, society will continue compensating by dumbing down other elements here and there, sparing no expense. Eventually we will reach a state where the two forces shall collide in a terrible cataclysm, annihilating each other in a sort of literary Armageddon. Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, an impish man whose name could once be expressed in the form of a word— whatever the hell that means— will sit back in his big purple velour armchair as a satisfied smile slowly creeps onto his lips, looking proudly upon the linguistic demon he helped unleash.

…Yet, despite all the craziness and the controversy, the riots and political action committees all clashing in the name of phonetics, I sometimes wonder what Ben Franklin is thinking when he’s looking down on us from that big lexicological conference in the sky. Maybe I’m totally off, but I’d wager he’d be saying “:)”