You Say Potato - Quayle Says Potatoe

It must have seemed a great idea to the vice president's flacks. He would go to this grade school, see, and visit a classroom. OK! There he would kind of take part, you know, in a spelling bee. He would call out a word, and the kid would spell it, and Dan would give the kid a prize, OK?

OK. So Quayle called out "potato," the kid spelled it p-o-t-a-t-o, and the vice president looked at the flash card. Someone had hit him from the blind side. On the flash card it was "potatoe." Shucks, said the V.P. to himself, maybe that's how they spell it in New Jersey. The incident made fodder for the late-night comics, and Quayle, poor fellow, will never live it down.

I cite the incident as a text for my quarterly sermon on the importance of accurate spelling. First, a preliminary word. Spelling evolves. The Oxford English Dictionary informs us that over the centuries the spud has been known as botato, potaton, portato, potade, potatue, partata, potado, pottato, and yes - yes! - as potatoe.

The Quayle spelling appears in the early 18th century, when some benefactor introduced the potatoe to Wigtownshire. In 1757 Smollett regarded a certain M. de Champignon as worth less than a "rotten potatoe." Burns in 1786 called it a "potatoe." A century later, a number of botanical works used the Quayle orthography. Potatoes were stored in "potatoe pies." The potatoe beetle was a familiar pest.

Following a familiar course, in time the noun became a verb and an adjective. Land that had endured too many successive crops was said to be "potatoed out." Someone spoke of a "potatoeless breakfast." In 1865 a writer disparaged some regrettable vegetable. It was "as potatoey as the peach over the way."

During last month's Democratic revels in Madison Square Garden, I took refuge in an Irish saloon just off Seventh Avenue. The barmaid informed me that "it's always spelled with an `e' in Ireland." I cannot believe she lied.

That is absolutely all I know about the spelling of "potato," but I can add a word about spelling in high office. At the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice David Souter has a crotchet all his own. He spells "inquire" as "enquire." I made inquiry to the court's official reporter of decisions, Frank D. Wagner, and received a courteous note in return: "Justice Souter is aware that `enquiry' is not the usual American spelling, but prefers it anyway."

It remains to report that Rep. Phil Crane, of the Eighth District of Illinois, ran successfully for renomination in the state's March 17 primary. Obviously voters forgave him for advertising that "he has never excepted Political Action Committee (PAC) money." Way to go, Phil!

These things happen. At the highest levels of newspapering, up in the rarefied atmosphere where syndicated columnists live, spelling is still a problem. Ellen Goodman, a Pulitzer Prize winner, turned out a column about shopping in a Boston supermarket frequented by Russians. She exchanged greetings "in my own pigeon Russian." That's a spelling for the birds. It's pidgin Russian.

Another colleague in the column-writing racket, Lewis Grizzard, reminisced the other day about his three former wives. They were pretty decent about divorce, he said, but when they get in court a lot of ex-wives "go for the juggler." Funny things happen on the way to the forum.

Not long ago I fulminated against the supposed rule prohibiting ending a sentence with a preposition. A headline writer for the Vero Beach (Fla.) Press Journal caught the general idea: "No Rule Exists for Propositions." A little old lady in Port St. Lucie sent me a clipping. "I knew that," she said.

Well, there's quite a difference between a preposition and a proposition, which goes to show that it's important to get the letter `e' in its proper place. Vice President Quayle learned this the hard way: There ain't no `e' in potato - at least since 1856.

(Copyright, 1992, Universal Press Syndicate)

The Writer's Art by James J. Kilpatrick appears Sunday in the Scene section. Address comments or questions to: Writer's Art, c/o Newsroom, The Seattle Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111.