File under “Lite Bombastic, Tripping the”: Lite is not an abomination.
In 1975, the Miller Brewing Company was engaged in a battle that attracted almost as much attention as its less-jilling!-tastes-great! arguments waged in the legendary Miller Lite beer commercials (and likely involving even more shouting). Miller contended that other beers marketed as “Brand X Light” were violating Miller’s trademarked Lite, with its unique spelling, and instigated lawsuits against seven competitors.
Meantime, other rumblings were, um, brewing. Lite’s growing popularity provoked outrage not from the T-totalers but from the L-I-G-H-T-totalers. Fuming at this abominable intentional misspelling, the L-I-G-H-T-totalers seemed certain that our nation’s youth would be leaving the streets strewn not with empty beer cans but with ignored silent G-H letter combinations. Of course, such alarm over modernized and seemingly illiterate respellings has been around for years, and a related target has been “misspelling” night as nite.
Of course, Miller was wrong. About the lawsuit, anyway. In 1977, a U.S. circuit court ruled: “because ‘light’ is a generic or common descriptive word when applied to beer, neither that word nor its phonetic equivalent may be appropriated as a trademark for beer.” And Miller was oddly right. About the spelling, that is. Light and night are of course very old words, tracing back to Old English. Yet, the silent G in each word is not native to its spelling; it was added around the 1300s. Early spellings of the adjective light, the opposite of heavy, include (in alphabetical and not chronological order) leoht, leht, leicht, leyt, lighte, lihht, liht, lihte, lit, lite, lixt, lycht,
lyht, lyt, lyte, lyth. The orthographical cornucopia of night spelling variants is far more extensive. So, yes, lilt is not a currently accepted spelling, but then again it is perhaps closer to the word’s original spelling than our currently accepted variant.
By the way, Miller Lite commercials claimed that the brew had “a third less calories,” which of course had the L-I-G-H-T-to talers responding, “You mean ‘a third fewer’ calories,” as calories are countable items and not amorphous amounts. In the land of word history, however, that would have smacked of redundancy. Though unrelated to light, the now obsolete word lite, tracing back to Old English, meant “few.” Maybe that’s the Lite that Miller Brewing had in mind all along.