Culture

Smokey is the new smoky

A look into an increasingly newsworthy word that is commonly misspelled.

Culture

Smokey is the new smoky

A look into an increasingly newsworthy word that is commonly misspelled.

Ann-Derrick Gaillot Aug—20—2018 11:32AM EST

As firefighters battle the infernos taking over the American West, an entirely less consequential battle rages in local and regional newspaper headlines covering this summer’s wildfires: “smoky” vs. “smokey”. “Smokey superlatives,” reads a headline from the Discover Magazine blog. “Smokey skies possible from Western wildfires,” reads one headline from local TV station KELO of South Dakota. Meanwhile, according to The Washington Post, “Smoky skies, poor air from wildfires return to Northwest.”

To be clear, the word is “smoky,” which Oxford Dictionaries defines as “filled with or smelling of smoke,” “like smoke in colour or appearance,” or “having the taste or aroma of smoked food.” “Smokey” is a proper noun, as in musician Smokey Robinson or the musical/common diner name Smokey Joe’s Cafe. And as a spokesperson from the U.S. Forest Service confirmed to me via phone, the agency’s spelling fire safety mascot Smokey the Bear’s name with an “e” was intentional to differentiate it from the common adjective “smoky.”

But to be unclear, according to Oxford English Dictionary, “smokey” is also common in the U.S. The New York Times, looked to as one of the country’s arbiters of language, uses “smoky”. Except, that is, when it talks about Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s eye makeup or fish or, in one Facebook post, wildfire smoke in the air. Across the country, The Seattle Times, smack dab in the middle of a currently smoky city, likes to stick with “smoky”... except for in a recent article that has “Smokey brush fired closed I-5 near Northgate before it was controlled” as its headline and “Smoky fire alongside Interstate 5 jammed up traffic north of Seattle” as its subhead. (Another Times article from a year ago uses “smokey” in its subhead, though “smoky” is the spelling that it uses most consistently.)

All this variation is enough to freak out copy editors and other guardians of language. In search of answers and authority, I called up orthographer D.W. Cummings, emeritus professor of English at Central Washington University and author of American English Spelling: An Informal Description. When I asked him why there are two spelling for “smoky” he answered: “Well, because.”

Cummings added that the common spelling of the word seems to have changed in the 19th century when someone, likely an American with limited formal education, started leaving the “e” from “smoke” in the adjective form. As people in a community or culture misspell a word long enough, that aberration just becomes a norm. “There are a whole lot more words in the English language that have two or even more accepted spellings than we’ve been led to believe in our spelling classes when we were little kids in school,” Cummings said. “I suspect that very often we don’t even notice that we’re getting hit twice unless of course we have the misfortune of having a spelling class from some hard-nosed teacher who’s convinced that his or her spelling is correct.”

Maybe someday, every newspaper with Times in the title will feel bold enough to publish the headline “Smokie [fire emoji] air inspires gas mask looks at the Golden Globes.” Proper spelling, in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t really matter nor exist, particularly when the headlines are spelling out the human race’s fiery, ashy demise as a result of our own hubris, greed, and disregard for the preciousness of our natural world. Anyways, I spell it “smoky.”

Hear Professor D.W. Cummings and Ann-Derrick Gaillot tell us why everyone is wrong on The Outline World Dispatch.

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