Who makes these decisions about how we spell things?

One of the things that I inherited when my grandfather passed away many years ago is a nice lawyers bookcase that is full of a series of books called The Harvard Classics, published by P.F.Collier and Son in 1909. I’ve been looking at those volume lately with the resolve to finally read some, if not all of them before I go – a noble, if somewhat daunting task. These volumes apparently represented what the scholars of Harvard University thought contained the essential writings of the time, tomes with which any gentleman of letters should be acquainted. Various Harvard Professors edited them, this volume by one C. J. Bullock, PhD, professor of Economics.

I decided to start this week and had one false start in Volume 1 with the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. It was just too hard a read to be the one that I start on. So, I chose a second book, this one containing Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. Actually the official title is An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith was the premier political economist and moral philosopher of his time, which was the mid to late 1700’s. His treatise on The Wealth of Nations is generally accepted to be the foundation upon which modern economics is based. He wrote it between 1766 and 1776.

What I find fascinating about trying t o read this work – and it is a tough read, too – is how much the language has changed and how the spelling of common words has changed over time. Smith spelled choose as chuse, which various dictionaries define only as an obsolete spelling of choose, and shew (for show) much diffently than we do now. Some spellings are likely unique to the England and Scottland of Smith’s time, such as labour for labor. Some like the word artificer while still valid are just seldom used any more (it means a skilled laborer).

Much of the writing seems verbose and stilted by modern standards; however, I sometimes wonder if we haven’t become too terse in our pursuit of speed. And I wonder who makes all of the decisions about how something is spelled or if words that we use are actually really words? My wife cringes every time that I use the “word” snuck (as in the past tense of sneak), which she quickly reminds me is not an accepted word, but accepted by whom? I guess there may be official boards of lexicographers somewhere who meet in secret every now and then and decide which collections of letters actually are officially to be recognized as words. I would guess they bless not on the spelling but the definition(s) at that time – at least I chuse to believe that.