Hey, everybody: words have spellings!

I may be wrong about this, but—in this ad, the joke, which at first I thought might be spiritually related to that dumb "Good afternoont!" business on Tyler Perry posters lately (not actually "dumb": I just haven't seen the movies and don't get the reference*), is pretty clearly that they're replacing the last syllable of November with the sound people make when they're cold. Right? Since this is a movie about penguins?

Only thing: "BURR"? Again, maybe I'm just not getting the joke†—I really wanted to see the first one and haven't gotten the chance yet!‡—but the correct spelling of the sound you make when you're cold is not burr but brrr.

Yes: "the correct spelling." I say "the correct spelling" because (a) I have lived in this society, speaking English, for decades, and read, and therefore have a working knowledge of the standard spelling of many of our English words, and (b) I confirmed this in the dictionary:

Apple's dictionary widget (Oxford American Dictionaries)

Also, Google (those refrigerator guys know what's up)

OED, QED!

Again, maybe the "burr" in "Novemburr" isn't even supposed to be an "I'm cold" sound and I'm attacking what is essentially an intellectual mirage. But at this point I don't care because now I want to talk about a larger issue (which actually I think I probably have complained about before):

Thinking that because a word is slang or "casual" it can be spelled however the hell you want drives me nuts. Partly I think it drives me nuts because in a somewhat counterintuitive or circuitous way it registers as snobbery: somehow these are not "real" words (intellectually congruous offenses—to this, not as much to each other—here and the first full ¶ here). It also drives me nuts because... well, there's like a 10–15% chance that I'm just making this up, but I'm pretty sure that the dictionary is something that first came about as an attempt to standardize the spellings of things, and this sort of thing (also, yea for yeah, ya'll for y'all, gonna' for gonna, etc.) feels like devolution, a backsliding. If there's one thing that does not need democratization, it's spelling. If there's two things, it's spelling and, like, car parts. If my car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, I don't want the mechanic to be like, "Shit, this is one of those Southern California cars. I have no clue how to fix it." And if I want to communicate with another English speaker, I don't want to be like, "Well, I know what this word means to me, but Lord knows how you're using it!"

[Or—I don't know. I guess that's a kind of rationalization, or ex post facto reasoning. The real source of my frustration is probably that, in this world, I think the question of the objective versus the subjective, the absolute versus the relative, order versus chaos, is an important one, since I feel like it's in the pre-med program to the medical school of ethics and morality. And so the willy-nilly blurring of objective–subjective lines probably provokes an overreaction in me.
    I mean, frankly, most things are relative, I think—or at least incredibly difficult to nail down as absolute. As such, when you find things that are absolute—usually a function of defined terms, such as, "If we agree that two parallel lines BY DEFINITION can never under any circumstance meet, then it is in fact objectively wrong (and not a matter of opinion) to say that two parallel lines are maybe going to meet"—I'm touchy about acting like it's anybody's guess. In other words, trash the starting point—say, "Well, I don't agree that two parallel lines ever meet!"—but don't agree to that and then act like it doesn't make a difference.
    I feel like when a major motion picture is coming out, a big-budget Hollywood release, there's some reason to treat spelling as a settled, agreed-upon issue,§ some reason to say, "OK, in the English-speaking America, spelling has been more or less standardized, so, where standardized, let's stick to the standards." Acting like there is no standard spelling of slang words registers to me as a kind of backdoor assault on the very concept on shared language and, in turn, on whatever chance we have in this godless world for morality.
     OK, I may be overreaching just a little. It may just be that I feel about misspellings the way a lot of Americans might feel if they heard me say, "Wait, how many rounds are there in a basedball match?"**]



* Still dumb.

† Although I did just Google "happy feet burr" and all that came up was that Ty Burr of EW.com gave the DVD an "A-."

‡ No.

§ Unless the spelling is being changed to make a joke or something, obviously: I'm not objecting to the "misspelling" of November because the whole joke is to alter the last syllable. But I defy you to explain to me how (if it's true that burr =  brrr, which, again, I'm not sure it is, but if it is) Novemburr as opposed to Novembrrr is itself a kind of joke. [I wouldn't object as much to "Novemberrr," even. Why the U? A conscious choice, you really think? Or just ignorance? AGAIN: Maybe there's some "burr" joke I'm missing. BUT IF NOT...]

** I went to a basedball match the other day! True story! It actually got really amazing at the end: the local group was down 3-0 at the tail end of the ninth round, but then they scored one point, and there was this amazing moment when the score was 3-1, with one fault left to them, two warnings, I think three throw-error credits, and all the mats "laden" with "dodgers"!! Then the swinger missed a ball the thrower threw, and the visiting group won the tournament.