For a moment last week, a reader of the Washington Times-Herald might have thought that the newspaper's printers had gone on a spree. The Times-Herald blossomed with strange new spellings of familiar words, e.g., sherif, midrif, sofistry, thorofare. But a Page One box explained everything. The Times-Herald, now the Washington outpost of the Chicago Tribune's Colonel Robert R. McCormick, had simply adopted the Trib's famed peculiarities of style (TIME, July 18, 1949). Henceforth, like the Trib, the Times-Herald will drop the silent letters on the end of such words as cigarette, catalogue, substitute "f" for "ph" in the middle of words...
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