Henrietta Hay's Column

Let's face it. English is a crazy language. We have spellcheckers on our computers to give us correct spelling, and closed captions on our television sets to give us the dialogue. Neither one can deal consistently with all the English homonyms which have 3 or 4 spellings and meanings for one pronunciation. This verse came from "The Spellchecker Song," by J. Alec West on the Internet.

To rite with care is quite a feet

Of witch won should be proud,

And wee mussed dew the best wee can,

Sew flaws are knot aloud.

And then there is closed captioning. Tele - vision. "Tele" means far off, distant and "vision" means -- well we all know what that means. Television brings us sights from far off, But as a person with a hearing loss I need some hearing along with the seeing.

I suppose in modern politically correct language the millions of us who do not hear well would be labeled auditorially challenged. (If my freshman English teacher at Boulder were to see that word my career would be over.) To add insult to injury, where television is concerned, we are understandingly challenged, which is to say that a lot of the time we don't know what is going on. That may very well be a good thing, but I am curious.

One of the great inventions of the television age is closed captioning, developed to help the 28 million Americans who are hard of hearing. It really isn't a new idea, though, to people of my generation. I remember sitting in the old Englewood Theater on south Broadway on Saturday afternoons with all the other kids in town watching Charley Chaplin in The Gold Rush, Harold Lloyd hanging on the clock hand far above the street as it steadily moved toward 6 o'clock, the Keystone Kops and all the other silent stars careening around.

The dialogue, such as it was, was appeared in print across the bottom of the screen. The bigger kids shouted the words out loud for the little ones who couldn't read yet. At that time I was not checking the spelling.

And now we have the modern version of those subtitles. Closed captioning at long last lets me see what people are saying on television. At my end of the "tele" I need a decoder, which is now standard equipment in most TV sets.

On the other end, broadcasters have made closed captioning available on almost all programming on the commercial networks and on a great deal of local and public television. It can even be seen occasionally on football games, but I don't think of that as an asset.

My first reaction to the whole idea was that those little green men out in space are at it again. I sit there and read the dialogue as it is being spoken. Surely it is not possible that anyone could type as fast as a person could talk, or that a machine could translate that fast. There are several methods of doing it, but the real-time captioning is based on the principles of court reporting, with the help of some highly sophisticated machines and some very talented people. A stenotype machine is used to translate spoken words into phonetic spellings, which are then translated. Now we have added phonetic spelling to the other problems.

And that's where the fun starts. English and phonics are not necessarily compatible. Translating from the phonetic spelling -- to the correct meaning and spelling -- to the screen in an instant can create some amazing phrases. Spellcheckers and closed captions share the problem. Some weird and wonderful things show up on TV.

I think the all time prizewinner was in an ad for Carnival Cruise Lines. The CC (closed captioning, for the benefit of hearing people) came out "Carnal Ship, Destiny." I hope nobody told Cathy Lee Gifford.

The Nobel prize in fizz icks was awarded this year. And micro came out ma crow.

One day I met a couple of interesting characters, Harry Chess and Chris Mutt. But I don't care how they spell it. Closed captioning is wonderful for hard of hearing people. We get an added humor factor and we are very selective.

I watch only the programs and newscasts that I can read while I watch.

"Sow ewe can sea why aye dew prays

Such soft wear four pea seas,

And why eye brake in two averse

Buy righting want too please."