Does the ordre of letters in a word mattre?

For the past several years, a behind-the-scenes war played out between the acting world and traditional media.

The issue: Spelling. Of one specific word. Is it "theater" or "theatre?"

It's "theater," of course, but not everyone agrees. The tension is particularly rampant in Fairfield-Suisun, because the drama groups all decided to spell their facilities wrong. At least according to newspapers and Americans.

The drama troupes call them "theatres." You know, the Downtown Theatre. The Missouri Street Theatre. Solano College Theatre.

Newspapers – particularly this one – drew a line in the sand. They said, in essence, that you can call the building a "theatre" if you want and you can call your troupe a "theatre," but we won't use "theatre" as a generic term, because we're not British. And it's not the 18th century. And we learned how to spell in elementary school.

Isn't this the kind of thing we fought the Revolutionary War to prevent? Wasn't King George III trying to force us to spell wrong? Didn't the Boston Tea Party have the desire for freedom to spell correctly?

Isn't this a step backward?

Then I thought about it. And realized I might be wrong.

We let groups self-identify all the time. Every few years, a subgroup of our culture comes out with a new way to describe themselves and we go along. The dictionary is filled with words that are considered outdated or even politically incorrect, so we don't use them anymore.

So maybe the theater . . . er, theatre . . . people are right. Maybe we should just give them a break and let them spell wrong if they want.

Aftre all, there's nothing that says you can't change the ordre of lettres in words, right? And we do speak English, which means that sometimes the people in the mothre country might be correct in how they spell things.

Whether the lettres are in the right ordre or not isn't really up to me. Or to you. Language changes ovre time and sometimes we should change with it.

When I say "we," I mean not only you and me, but newspapres, television reportres and even dictionary editors.

Perhaps the theatre people are on to something. Maybe our language is changing and they are making it bettre fastre.

Aftre all, they do a lot of great plays. You know, "A Streetcar named Desier," "Fiddlre on the Roof," "Jane Eyer" and "Petre Pan."

To deny them the right to spell the word incorrectly could create, to paraphrase Shakespeaer, "the wintre of their discontent."

I guess my point is to let the theatre people embrace their inner misspellre.

Then I thought about it and realized they're wrong. I'm American. We have rules. We spell words correctly.

I'm not ready to change the Constitution to say, "We the people, in ordre to form a more perfect union."

It's time to re-draw that line in the sand.

Otherwise, soonre or latre, we'll be spelling wrong and not know it.

Brad Stanhope is a formre Daily Republic editor. Reach him at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.