Words

A few months ago, Stu Maschwitz and I were going back-and-forth about the syntax guide for [Fountain](http://fountain.io/syntax). I emailed him a correction:

> One search-and-replace: Dialog should be Dialogue. The Mac dialog box is an oddball. Happy to debate current and future usage, but every screenwriting text currently uses the “ue”.

We didn’t debate. We kept the “ue” on the end of dialogue.

But ever since I typed those sentences, I’ve been hyper-aware of this word in print and online. I think the trend is clear.

The “ue” is going away.

In ordinary newspapers and magazines, I’ve seen *dialog* used frequently.

> The goal is “a timely dialog,” said Lynne Greene, global president for the Clinique, Origins and Ojon brands at the Estée Lauder Companies in New York. [[NY Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/business/media/spotting-the-trends-before-they-break-out-advertising.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=dialog&st=cse)]

> The hope is that they can run a two-track message operation, one that allows Obama to keep slightly above the fray even as the national dialog around his re-election effort becomes relentlessly negative. [[Time](http://swampland.time.com/2011/08/22/all-the-presidents-talking-heads/)]

Some dictionaries claim that *dialogue* is the British spelling, while *dialog* is American. But I’m pretty sure that’s wrong.

Rather, I think *dialog* came from its use in computers, specifically the Mac dialog box. As far as I can rememember, these little alert windows have never had a “ue” at the end. It’s not hard to imagine the designer/programmers leaving off the silent ending, either deliberately or inadvertently. *Dialog* fits nicely with *analog,* itself a tech-y term.

The “-logue” ending is clear sign that word has come through French from Greek (“logos” meaning word or thought). Here are a few others:

* monologue

* prologue

* epilogue

* travelogue

* catalog/catalogue

The last example feels like a good precendent, with the shortened version clearly taking over. This chart shows the use of *catalog* and *catalogue* in American books published in the 20th century:

(Chart courtesy [Grammarist](http://grammarist.com/spelling/catalog-catalogue/).)

I think we’re approaching a similar crossing point with *dialog*. ((If you do the same Ngram comparison with dialog/dialogue, you get odd results that mostly show there were a lot of computer books published in the 1990s.))

Which one to use
—

For now, I’m sticking with *dialogue* for things related to screenwriting. Every book about the format uses the long version of the word, so there’s no urgency to switch.

Also, *dialogue* simply feels more literary. “Monolog” and “epilog” could be words, but they’re not currently in use, and look very wrong to me.

For computers, *dialog* seems like the right choice. (It’s almost always *dialog box* anyway.)

I finally finished watching the 2011 Scripps National Spelling Bee, which had been sitting half-viewed on my DVR for months. No surprise: the final words were ridiculously difficult.

As [NPR explains](http://www.npr.org/2011/06/01/136827976/spelling-bee-pregame-why-are-some-words-so-hard):

> The Bee competitors often worry about “the dreaded schwa.” When there’s an unstressed vowel in a word that they haven’t studied, they might not know whether it’s spelled with an a, e, i, o, or u.

> Last year’s finalists were stumped by words like fustanella (a skirt worn by men in some Balkan countries, misspelled as “fustinella”), caprifig (a wild variety of fig, misspelled as “caprofig”) and meperidine (a synthetic narcotic drug, misspelled as “meperedine”).

But it wasn’t always so difficult. Looking at the Wikipedia article on [past champions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Scripps_National_Spelling_Bee_champions), one finds the winning words from past decades are so easy that even common screenwriters could probably win.

Compare:

1932 | knack
1933 | torsion
1934 | deteriorating
1935 | intelligible
1936 | interning
1937 | promiscuous
1938 | sanitarium
1939 | canonical
1940 | therapy
1941 | initials
1942 | sacrilegious
1946 | semaphore
1947 | chlorophyll
1948 | psychiatry

to…

                        
2001 | succedaneum
2002 | prospicience
2003 | pococurante
2004 | autochthonous
2005 | appoggiatura
2006 | Ursprache
2007 | serrefine
2008 | guerdon
2009 | Laodicean
2010 | stromuhr
2011 | cymotrichous

Really, 1941: You let Louis Edward Sissman win with “initials?” I know there was a war and everything, but c’mon. How was he going to misspell that? Inishuls? Uhniciulz? intls?

Regardless, belated congrats to Sukanya Roy. You’ll never need to use “cymotrichous” again, but all those hours spent studying Greek and Latin roots will genuinely improve your vocabulary.

**Update:** Nima points out that Louis Edward Sissman ended up becoming a [notable poet](http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/sissman.htm) — L.E. Sissman. He used initials!

That quaint “yee” was actually pronounced “the.” The confusion with the “y” sound began because Medieval scribes had to make some [difficult choices](http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2922077):

> Medieval English thus contained a variety of signs for the sound ‘th’ – the digraph ‘TH’, the thorn, and the eth (or thok). Scribes ended up using a mixture of these, although some tried to make a distinction between those used for a voiced ‘th’ sound and the signs used for a voiceless ‘th’. As a result, reading medieval texts today can be enormously confusing. Is that a ‘y’? Is it a ‘p’? Or a ‘th’? The problem is compounded by the inclusion of yet another runic sign which made it into Medieval English – the wen, a symbol that looks very like a thorn, except that the triangular portion sits even higher, giving it a strong look of an angular ‘p’.

The thorn symbol persists in UTF-8 character sets – Þ – but was lacking in early typesetting.

> There was no thorn sign in the printing fonts, as they were usually cast outside of England. So, since the sign for thorn slightly resembled the lower-case ‘y’, that’s what was substituted.

In screenwriting, you’re always balancing accuracy with expectation. Thus, the warriors of Sparta speak English with British accents — because anything else would feel strange to the audience.

But in portraying your characters’ world, you have wide latitude. If you’re writing a broad comedy set in Medieval times, go ahead and ye it up. Put it Zapf Chancery if it helps sell the joke.

But in more serious films, I’d love to see written English portrayed more as it would have been in the time. That is, really odd to modern eyes, filled with runic characters and odd constructions.

(Link from the BBC via [Andy Baio](https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/103166642791522304) via [Phil Nelson](https://twitter.com/#!/philnelson).)