English Spelling is Tuff to Change

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Grant, I think you will agree that English spelling is a hot mess.

Hot boiling mess.

And you know, people have complained about irregular English spelling for centuries.

And some of them have been upset enough to try to fix it. But the problem, as you know so well, is that when it comes to language, it’s really hard to impose changes from the top down. It gets messy very, very, very quickly.

And for a look at just how messy and often how funny these attempts can be, you must read a wonderful new book by Gabe Henry. It’s called Enough is Enough, Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell. The second enough in that title is spelled E-N-U-F, as you might have guessed.

In any case, one of those would-be spelling reformers was Ben Franklin, who proposed removing six letters from the alphabet, C, J, Q, W, X, and Y. And he also did things like urging that we take the I out of friend and spell the word busy as B-I-Z-I.

Now, obviously, that didn’t work. But also for a while, Mark Twain gave it a shot. He was assuring people that fixing English spelling would rid us of bugaboos like diphtheria and pterodactyl.

And Twain was in fact part of a so-called simplified spelling board that was assembled by Dale Carnegie. And he assembled this group of intellectual all-stars that included a Supreme Court Justice and the presidents of Stanford and Columbia Universities, a former secretary of the Treasury, and others.

And this board decided two things. First of all, they were going to focus solely on subtracting letters, never adding new ones. And the second thing they resolved is that they would never describe this as spelling reform. They would instead describe it as spelling simplification because they figured that somehow that was easier for the public to accept.

And in 1906, this group released a list of 300 simplified words that they said everybody should start using. So people should spell through as T-H-R-U and though as T-H-O, but they should also spell the past tense of look the way it sounds. So L-O-O-K-T, if you can believe that.

And New York City school officials agreed, and soon children across that city were being taught these spellings.

And there was one other person who was really impressed by this, and that was President Teddy Roosevelt. And in August of 1906, he issued an executive order that all public federal documents must be written in this simplified phonetic spelling. Talk about executive overreach.

The results were laughable and newspapers had a field day. I mean, you can just picture all the editorial cartoons of that time. There was one of Roosevelt shooting up a dictionary.

But within months, Congress pushed back and the House overwhelmingly passed a resolution demanding that government documents go back to the old spelling. So the result was this big humiliation for Roosevelt.

And even Mark Twain came around because later he declared in a speech, simplified spelling is all right, but like chastity, you can carry it too far.

That’s pretty good.

And of course, one of the problems with this, and I’m sure the book talks about this, is that when we start simplifying spelling, we kind of simplify it for just one dialect because words aren’t pronounced the same in English everywhere.

Right?

So we start running into these problems where your vowel isn’t my vowel and your consonant isn’t my consonant.

That’s a really good point.

And, of course, it’s all a result of the mishmash that is the history of English spelling.

I mean, there were so many different historical forces.

And then, as you said, dialectal variants.

It’s amazing that we have agreed to spell as many words the same way as we have.

So this book is Enough is Enough by…

By Gabe Henry.

That second enough is spelled E-N-U-F.

And the subtitle is Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell.

Of course, we’ll link to that on our website when we post to this episode.

If you’ve got a book you’d like to recommend or you want us to talk about, send it to words@waywordradio.org.

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