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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 17:6 (2018) ► pp.812–830

Spelling-gate

Politics, propriety and power

ORCID logo | University of Liverpool

Back in 2009, the Labour British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was attacked for “bad spelling” in a condolence letter written personally by him to the mother of a soldier who died in combat, and publicised by The Sun newspaper. “Spelling” here acts as a leveller of hierarchical differences in the national political culture, with ruler and subject both publicly disciplined by the same standard language ideology. Previous research on orthography as social practice has tended to focus on deliberate manipulation of fixed spellings; this article extends the approach to unconventional spellings that have come about ‘by mistake’, and also widens it, to consider aspects of orthography other than spelling, focusing on the look of the Prime Minister’s handwriting. At issue, semiotically, are meanings such as ‘the personal touch’ and ‘respect’.

Keywords: orthography as social practice, handwriting, spelling, visual aspects of writing, sociolinguistics of writing, political culture, British political culture, media discourse, semiotics of writing, haptics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Context
  • 3.Theory
  • 4.The personal touch
  • 5.Disrespect
  • 6.Adding insult to injury
    • 6.1Insult
    • 6.2Injury
    • 6.3Victim
  • 7.Conclusions
    • 7.1Spelling-gate and the sociolinguistics of writing
    • 7.2Spelling-gate and British political culture: beyond partisanship
  • References
Published online: 14 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.17072.ric
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