Why simplified spelling nearly took over America (and why it didn't), with Gabe Henry
31:06 Share

This Father's Day, help Dad be all he can be with a gift from the Home Depot. Because he's not just Dad, he's the handyman of the house, the plumber in a pinch, and the emergency mechanic. Upgrade his gear this Father's Day with the Husky Mechanics 270-piece tool set from the Home Depot. Now on special buy for $119, a $695 value. For every kind of Dad, find the perfect gift this Father's Day at the Home Depot.

Amazon presents Lisa vs. the Mosquito.

Surviving 100 million years, Mosquito shook off the plate tectonic breakup of Pangea, the asteroid that eliminated the dinosaurs and the Ice Age. But Lisa shopped on Amazon and bought a can of repellent, a cute long-sleeved shirt, and a citronella candle. Hey, Mosquito, Lisa just bodied you. Save the everyday with deals from Amazon.

Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with Gabe Henry, author of Enough is Enough, this fabulous new book about simplified spelling. Gabe, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. Thanks so much for having me. You bet. I loved your book. And simplified spelling, it's something I have been interested in. I've heard a little bit about. I thought I knew more than I did. And I'm so glad to be here.

And maybe we can start by giving people an idea of what the reasons have been that amazingly so many people have lobbied to simplify the spelling of the English language. Well, I mean, the core argument behind this simplified spelling movement is that spelling should match how we speak. And right now it doesn't.

Our language is filled with silent letters, contradictory spellings, contradictory rules, and bizarre holdovers from French, Norse, Latin, and it puts this unnecessary burden on learners. And the idea for the simplified spellers with that was that they wanted to remove those obstacles, make language more consistent, less wasteful, and just easier to learn. Right. So easier to learn for children.

Easier to learn for people learning English as a second language. And then the cost issue was something that was sort of new to me. Can you say more about the cost part? It's interesting. So some people approach simplified spelling from this social reformer, increasing literacy point of view. They want people to be more literate, more widely spread knowledge and participation in society among non-native speakers.

And doing that would require really simplifying our spelling and making it more phonetic, more logical. That was one point of view. And the other point of view, which started in the 1700s, it really peaked in like the early 1900s, was that simplified spelling would have this profit value. It would take a shorter time to write, quicker to learn.

It would save ink, it would save paper, it would save time, it would save money. And for people who, let's say you owned a business, let's say you owned a newspaper, this would save the wear and tear on your typewriters, it would save the amount of time it would take for an article to be written, and it would also save space on your front page. It would allow you to put more in less space. And all in all, it was these marginal profits that...

really drove people like Noah Webster, for instance. So in 1789, Webster, he was one of these first spelling reformers, and he calculated that his version of simplified spelling, which would have changed the word laugh to L-A-F, tough to T-U-F, and tongue to T-U-N-G, he calculated that this would save printers about one page out of 18.

which doesn't quite sound like a lot, but for a 180-page book, that's 10 pages. 360-page book, that's 20 pages. And those were the calculations a lot of these people were making. So from every point of view, there was a practical motive to pursue this.

Yeah. I mean, people got a lot closer to making simplified spelling happen broadly than I had realized before. And, you know, the one that seemed especially successful actually was the newspaper. And it was the profit motive in the Great Depression. Can you talk about Chicago and what happened there? Well, as your listeners who grew up in Chicago between 1934 and 1975 would know,

The Chicago Tribune utilized a moderate form of simplified spelling as part of their house style for 41 years.

So they had words like past tense of kiss. You would say kissed. They would spell it K-I-S-T. Not in every case, but in a lot of cases, they use the word though spelling it T-H-O through T-H-R-U. And there were probably hundreds of words like this that were part of their house style. And it was really the closest we ever got to implementing simplified spelling on a wide scale.

not global, but definitely national scale, because here was one of the top three or five newspapers in the country. And it was already carrying this baton forward, this baton that had been passed from Benjamin Franklin to Noah Webster to Mark Twain. And now the Chicago Tribune is

Putting this idea of simplification in front of the eyes of everybody as they pass a newsstand on their way to work. It was part of their morning commute to kind of be absorbed into this world of simplification. And the newspaper was owned by a man named Robert McCormick. And when Robert McCormick died in 1975, I believe, his editors kind of just stopped using his style and reverted everything back. Yeah.

41 years. Did the people of Chicago like it? The Tribune did a poll five years after implementing it, and they found that a vast majority of people liked it. And I don't know what it was about it. There's a novelty to seeing a word on the front page spelled in a simplified way. There's a, you know, they spelled the word jazz with one Z.

It's not a huge change, but there's something that maybe makes your city feel unique and maybe makes you feel a little bit special by having your own orthography, even if it's not technically formalized in the schools yet. But it did set you apart. And I think that some Chicagoans took some pride in it, if they even noticed it at all, because it was just there in the background. Yeah.

Oh, that's really interesting that you think it had to do maybe a little bit with city pride, because I knew that Noah Webster viewed his spellings as sort of an American pride thing. But I didn't know that Samuel Johnson also did, too. Man, I mean, language itself is so tied into identity and tradition, and it's used all the time.

as a way to show your inclusion in some group or to exclude other people from a group. And for Noah Webster, it was his idea for simplified spelling came out of this impulse to differentiate America from England. This is post-American Revolution...

The founding fathers are trying to figure out how do we distinguish ourselves in culture, in politics, and in language. And there were talks in the 1780s about how can we replace English? Because we don't want to speak the language of our oppressor.

Maybe we should replace it with French. Maybe we should replace it with Greek or Latin. And Noah Webster's idea was, we don't have to replace our language entirely. We can distinguish ourselves from our oppressor by spelling differently. Not spelling using English, but American English. And that's how he came up with these simplifications in 1789. Words again like though, T-H-O, and through, T-H-R-U. It came from this patriotic language.

where he wanted to declare this linguistic independence. Yeah, that's so fascinating. And I always did think of simplified spelling as an American thing because I knew the Noah Webster story. But in your book, you talk about how it actually started many, many years earlier than that in Britain. There were already movements to simplify spelling before.

Because it is so hard for kids to spell. It's true, right, that English is harder for children to learn to spell than most other languages, right? Yeah, by magnitudes, probably. We have a very unphonetic spelling, very contradictory spelling, possibly the worst in the world when it comes to that. We don't have...

Like, just think of the word laughter rhymes with after, but it doesn't rhyme with daughter. You have choir rhymes with liar, rhymes with prior, rhymes with fryer and buyer and tire and pyre. And they're all spelled differently. They've all picked their own different orthographic roots to get to that sound. It's chaos. And then we have eight different ways of pronouncing O-U-G-H. Through, though, bow, tough,

And what we're missing is a unified system of rules whereby you can learn those rules and then apply them to scenarios as you encounter them. We don't have that. We have the best we have is mnemonic devices. I before E except after C. But even those have so many exceptions, it's not even worth calling a rule. So most romance languages are way better. Spanish and German are very phonetic.

French has its share of silent letters, but again, it's not the existence of silent letters so much as the contradictory usage of them that we have to deal with speaking English.

Yeah. So it's a real challenge for kids learning the language. And some people along the way have thought that their time could be better spent learning other things rather than our quirky spelling system. And that was another thing that surprised me in your book is how many times teachers got behind simplified spelling. There's like the New York City School Board, I think, and actually the National Education Association. They got really close. Yeah.

They got very close. There was a period, I think, in 1898 that the National Education Association adopted what they called the 12 words. So this was the most moderate form of simplification they were open to, just 12 words. I don't remember off the top of my head what they were, but I believe they included though and through words.

Already by then, color and honor without the U were already part of American English. And they pushed it for a few years. And obviously, lobbying for a national education society or association to get on board with this was the holy grail for these reformers because they really need the authority, the language authority of our country to give its okay. Unfortunately, we don't really have...

a full language authority in this country. There's no board. There's no French Academy that really can just change the rules at the stroke of a pen. The closest we have are these teachers associations and we have,

presidents and the Oval Office. But as Theodore Roosevelt found out, even that wasn't enough to change our language. Yeah. And then there was a debate and then a vote, right? So like the National Education Association, like they almost voted in simplified spelling. But then there was this debate that like changed possibly the future for spelling in America. It's crazy to think how much

of our language hinged upon just a few years, right at the turn of the 20th century, where simplified spelling really had the momentum, more momentum than it ever had. It had the support of professors and writers and Andrew Carnegie, the richest man in the world, and Theodore Roosevelt, the most powerful man in the world, and Mark Twain, the most famous writer in the world. And all at once, these people were...

building this momentum. And it really, I think if you were living at the time, you would have thought, there's a pretty good chance my children will be spelling in a different way than I will. Because of some well-timed or poorly timed circumstances, it just never caught on. The press was always against it, I think, because the journalists come out of, that have this great linguistic pride, you know, they have mastered their skill set. Their skill set is language. And

So I think that they were a little bit more puritanical about it. And so every time that simplified spelling seemed to flare up a little bit in pop culture, the press and the journalists came with their sarcastic, phonetic, exaggerated headlines and their political cartoons and just turned it into a target for mockery.

Yeah, it's easy to make fun of because it does look, it looks kind of ridiculous when you see it, especially at first. That was my first impression. I think that would probably be most people's first impression. I mean, it does look like a child wrote it. Because if you asked a child, if you asked a five-year-old to spell, to sound out the word enough, they'd probably spell it E-N-U-F.

So the powers that be in journalism and in the literary world, they didn't want their language to be turned into a joke. Even if by simplifying our language, it would allow more people to speak it. It would allow more people to be included in our culture. They really thought that there's something...

beautiful, maybe in the string of irrational letters that they want to hold to, because that's, again, it's tied to their identity. That's who they are. That's who they feel they are.

Discover a spectacular oceanfront destination with crystal blue seas, 360 days of sunshine, and the cool Bahamian breeze. Bahamar, located in Nassau, Bahamas, offers your choice of three luxury hotels and over 45 fine dining and nightlife options. You'll find a 15-acre tropical water park, John McEnroe Tennis Center, Jack Nicklaus Signature Golf Course, and a great place to stay.

John Batiste's All New Jazz Club, and the Caribbean's largest casino. Visit Bahamar.com today and discover your next vacation. This Father's Day, help Dad be all he can be with a gift from the Home Depot. Because he's not just Dad, he's the handyman of the house, the plumber in a pinch, and the emergency mechanic.

Upgrade his gear this Father's Day with the Husky Mechanics 270-piece tool set from The Home Depot. Now on special buy for $119, a $695 value. For every kind of dad, find the perfect gift this Father's Day at The Home Depot.

As temperatures rise, it's the perfect time to refresh your wardrobe with not just summer essentials, but versatile pieces for every season ahead. Quinn's pieces are timeless, lightweight, and far more elevated than anything else at this price. Like 100% European linen shorts and dresses from $30, luxe swimwear, Italian leather platform sandals, and so much more. Every season, you can find a new collection of Quinn's pieces at the store.

Everything from Quince is half the cost of similar brands because they work directly with top artisans and cut out the middleman, giving you luxury without the markup. And I have to tell you about the great experience I had with my last Quince order. So I ordered the Poplin A-Line Maxi Skirt, and when it came, I tried it on, and it is super comfortable. And it's this crisp, bright white, which I loved.

But then I looked at it and I thought, what was I thinking? A white skirt? I will ruin this gorgeous thing within a week with some splatter of food or by brushing up against the neighbor's dog. I am so not the kind of person who should have a white skirt.

So they say they have easy returns, and now I can tell you they do. I packed that thing up and easily exchanged it for a dark blue skirt, which I also love and now wear all the time, running recklessly through the world, splatters, dogs, and all.

So give your summer closet an upgrade with Quince. Go to quince.com slash grammar for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. That's quince.com slash grammar to get free shipping and 365-day returns. quince.com slash grammar

I mean, for a very brief time, Roosevelt ordered the government printing office to use simplified spelling. I mean, do you think that he tried to go too fast or did the president doing it make it too political? Besides the journalists, you know, not not liking it whatsoever.

Were there other reasons, you think? Or was it really just the journalists? I think Roosevelt went too fast. So this is 1906, and this is right when Andrew Carnegie founds and funds the Simplified Spelling Board in New York City. And this is a board that has a lot of clout in the literary world. Mark Twain's on this board.

Melville Dewey, who created the Dewey Decimal System. There's a U.S. Supreme Court Justice on this board. William James, the philosopher. So they had the who's who of intelligentsia on their side.

And Roosevelt signed on pretty early, not as a board member, but pledging his full support to the movement. He directed his presidential stenographer to recast all correspondence and communication from his office in simplified spelling. He then expanded this to include most of the federal government in all their official documents. They would have to start spelling using what the Simplified Spelling Board called their 300 words code.

And this was the first, just the first draft of like a new dictionary that they would use.

But because he went so hard so fast, and because he was a political figure, he was a lightning rod. And it was just too easy to mock him. So there were dozens of political cartoons that are just making fun of this simplifier-in-chief and his hard-headed, stubborn reform desires. And there's one political cartoon that shows Roosevelt...

firing a revolver into a full, like a life-size, human-size dictionary, this symbolically murdering our language. And you have some of them in the book too. They're great. Yeah, I have as many as I could fit without HarperCollins having to charge $3 more, but I would have included them all if I could.

And there's one cartoon that shows Uncle Sam barricading a schoolhouse door trying to prevent Roosevelt from getting in. So that was the reaction. It was low-hanging fruit. It was too easy to make a joke about it. It's been political a lot. Simplified spelling was surprisingly political in nature, too. Not just controversial, but specifically political. I was delighted to read that it was big with suffragettes. My God, yeah. Again, it...

It had this quality where whatever biases or beliefs you have coming into it, you tend to see simplified spelling as mirroring it back to you. So yeah, if you come to simplified spelling from this

capitalistic, pro-business, money-minded point of view, you tend to see it for how it cuts costs. And if you're a social reformer in the 1850s, 1860s, you'll tend to see it for those abilities to increase literacy and increase education. So suffragist movement picked it up when in the 1860s, well, the whole stenography in secretarial trade was almost predominantly women. And

Their job was taking notes and taking transcriptions, taking minutes, and they latched on to Pittman shorthand as their ideal person.

not shortcut, but tool to be able to capture writing at the rate of speech. And Pittman shorthand is this, it's not simplified spelling exactly, but it was created by a simplified spelling reformer named Isaac Pittman. And by the 1860s, a lot of these, this profession of stenography started setting up all these women's shorthand schools to teach women how to

better do their job and do their job with more efficiency and productivity by learning shorthand. A lot of these schools started doubling as meeting spots for suffragists, and these groups kind of co-mingled, and they learned each other's. Suffragists learned the art of shorthand. Shorthanders joined the suffragist fight, and they became linked in this battle for women's rights.

It's amazing. And there were like, there were other, do you consider the efforts to have whole new scripts, whole new writing systems to be a form of simplified spelling? Or is it something a little different? I think it's an extreme version. It's like, if you take simplified spelling and extrapolate to its most phonetic essence, if you boil it down to its most phonetic essence, how short

Can you make a word? So if I spelled love, L-U-V, can you get it any shorter? What's beneath letters? You know, you can keep boiling down physical matter until you get to atoms. And then you get, you can get even smaller than that. And then you can get to quarks and you get smaller than that. So if you keep going down, what's the most essential element?

unit? What's the essential building block? And for shorthanders like Isaac Pittman, they came to the conclusion that just a dot or a swoop or a slash, that's the easiest hand movement that you can use to denote sound. Now there were other reformers who, instead of using shorthand swoops, they used numbers. That's their version of the most phonetic essence of language.

Hmm. I was saying college, I often wished I knew shorthand when I was taking so many notes, but I never bothered to learn, but it would have been so handy. One of the things, actually, the other thing that you would, so to speak, right? You know, when you talked, you mentioned pronunciation, and it reminded me that, you know, we don't all pronounce words the same way. So simplified spelling, that's one argument against simplified spelling is that

you know, do you spell it the way people in American English or British English or in people who live in the South, you know, say a word. And one thing that jumped out at me in your book too is,

like nobody could agree on the simplest form of a word. Like all these different simplified spelling groups, they came up with different spellings for the same word. So there's no one universal simplified version of any word. It's actually a big problem for the movement. Right. I think it's the biggest strike against it in that if you were to

convince a whole population to convert to simplified spelling. How would you spell certain words? Would you spell it according to New York accent or Sydney, Australia or Southern, Southern United States? I mean, I I'm from New York. I'd spell coffee, probably K A W because I,

have that Brooklyn thing. But someone in Chicago might spell it K-A-H, coffee, you know, and it just gets even more extreme when you go international with it. So there was one attempt in 1876 to

rectify or to bring together these various regional dialects into one simplified spelling proposal that they would consider an international proposal, this side of the Atlantic teaming up with this side, and we would, and this was timed to the centennial of the United States,

So they all met, dozens of reformers met in Philadelphia, and they spent four days in this, having this meeting about how to unite all these different simplified proposals into one. And they did. They came up with something called the Anglo-American Alphabet, which

Well, some people called it that. Others called it the alphabet of least resistance, which shows you how hardheaded these people could be. They couldn't even agree on a title. And that was a feeble attempt, but it really didn't do much overall to unite all these different factions. And the way the movement just fractured so much based on how people pronounced, that was one of the things that...

I think, got in the way. It was the biggest barrier. Yeah. What do you think of the etymology argument against simplified spelling? I get it. I do enjoy looking at a word and being able to detect its Latin root or its Greek root.

I think there's an interesting interest, curiosity puzzle to it. I am someone who lives in the literary world. I love language. I love puzzles. I love history. I would naturally be really biased toward having etymology intact in a word or having the history in a word. If you think about what the actual point of communication is,

If the actual intent of communication is to find the simplest, most efficient path between one person talking to another person, then I think that shortest path is not through etymology, it's not through history, it's through clarity. And I wouldn't side with one side with the reformers or the purists, but I do believe that

The way we're talking right now, neither of us are giving any thought to the etymology of the words I'm using. You just understand it automatically. And I think that a good way to increase literacy and inclusion is to have the same thing that we have in our written language that we have in our spoken language. Yeah, it was interesting to me that one reason given for simplified spelling was to increase the spread of

Right. That was their utopia, that English would eventually become the global language.

And that the only way for it to become that global language is to make it easier for everyone to that entry point. That entry point has to be wide. We don't want to gatekeep to such an extent that you're keeping out all these potential English spellers. Yeah, utopia is a great word. Yeah, these people, they were idealistic. A lot of them were very utopian. They had an ideal world that they were hoping for. I do want to talk about Twain.

idea of free spelling. He was such a character on again, off again with his simplified spelling. And he, and I think it was C.S. Lewis as well, like they had this idea just like spell however you want. Yeah.

Twain had such an interesting relationship with the whole movement. He was for the movement. He was against the movement. He was part of the Simplified Spelling Board. He went to associated press meetings and tried to convince the associated press to adopt simplified spelling. And then he turned on the movement pretty quickly. He believed that it would start making everything look chaotic, but he didn't.

And right in between those two extremes, hating and loving it, he was in this creative writing or creative spelling, free spelling camp where he did believe maybe this is just the romantic, artistic side of him thinking, why don't we all spell how we want?

his daughter was a poor speller, his wife was a poor speller, and he loved that in them because he would receive letters from them. And he took each misspelling to be some kind of marker of that person. It was like a fingerprint. It was like a, just the signature and it belonged to them. And the same way we all have identifying fingerprints or identifying tones of voice,

I think he thought that every human being could show that she could express themselves through their spelling. You could identify a person by whether they choose chose to spell cat with a K or a C. And he loved it. And he mentioned many times how much how much he loved the misspelling of his daughter, the misspelling of his wife.

And clearly, I don't think he ever imagined creative spelling or free spelling to be some kind of standard of the future where you just let everyone spell and it's a free-for-all. He did have this beautiful sense of language and spelling that it was almost like the brushstrokes of a painting, where if you standardize all brushstrokes on a painting, then you don't have Monet, you don't have Van Gogh. You just have these AI photographs that are just perfect, perfect.

but so perfect that they don't seem human. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's beautiful. And you know what it reminds me of actually is on the other version of the show, we have familects at the end of every episode. I play a family dialect, a story of a word that a family group or friends will use just with each other. So, you know, in, in, in word something that, yeah. And like for Twain, it's,

It was like spelling in his family was their familect. Like they had their inside spellings almost. Oh yeah, we talk about it all the time on the show. It's so beautiful and precious about it. You know, I would love to have lived in Mark Twain's brain for a little bit. I think it would have been such a beautiful place. It's another way of bringing families together, actually. It's having like family-specific spellings of things. Yeah, because we all have our...

Because we all have our inside jokes with our families that no one else will ever get. Might as well have your own inside spellings. Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. So you said that you think the most successful, enduring part of simplified spelling is actually in advertising. Talk about the Krispy Kremes. Oh, boy.

So until Roosevelt joins the movement, this simplified spelling movement really is the domain of educators, social reformers. It's a niche movement. It's on the outskirts of pop culture. But Roosevelt, he's the U.S. president, and he brings this into the Oval Office for three months.

And after that, simplified spelling was everywhere. It had infiltrated pop culture. It went from becoming the orthographic punchlines to articles. And it turned into, it was really absorbed into advertising. I think advertisers realized that they could use misspelling as this marketing gimmick, a way to catch the eyes of shoppers because...

You and I, if we're walking down the street and we see something misspelled, we're going to do a double take or we might linger just a half second longer on it. And it's that half second that means millions to people in the advertising industry. It's always the game, how to create the logo that's enduring, how to create the jingle that's enduring. And for them, it was the spelling. So in the 1920s, this big fad started or it...

It had been going on for a while, but it was starting to peak in the 20s, and...

This was the fad of replacing the hard letter C with the letter K. So you have brands like Krispy Kreme and Kleenex, Rice Krispies, Kool-Aid, of course. And one linguist at the time in the 20s had a name for this fad. She called it the craze for K. And she blamed it directly on the simplified spellers who had been pushing words like character with a K and chorus with a K since those days of Noah Webster.

So I think the 1920s, when advertising really became the place to see creative misspelling, that was the first mainstream application of the simplified spelling movement. Interesting.

Well, before we wrap up, I'm really curious. You obviously did a ton of research for this book. And I'm curious if your opinion about simplified spelling changed over the time that you were working on this book. I think it continues to change. I'm a little bit like...

like Twain in that way, I don't side with either extreme. Obviously, language has to change. Language is always evolving. And it evolves at a very slow pace on a very long scale. So I don't think we will see that many formal changes in spelling in our lifetimes. But I think given enough centuries, we will. So I think what the simplified spellers were trying to do was

expedite the natural evolution of language. And I think that's one of the reasons it failed. Language doesn't evolve from the top down like that. It doesn't evolve from this elite literary class trying to impose its ideas of linguistic utopia upon the whole country or the whole world, because there will naturally be a resistance to that.

I think that what we're seeing now and the way we all talk to each other informally in our digital shorthand, in our texting and social media, the way my dad texts me the word you as just the letter you all the time. I think that that is the natural evolution of language that we're witnessing a little bit of.

And right now it's in the informal territory. I think eventually it'll become formal. Dictionaries will start to absorb words like that. They've already absorbed OMG and LOL. So my point of view on the whole thing is that language is evolving anyway, and I don't think it's practical to artificially push it into its future, just as I don't think it's practical to try to pull it into the past. You have to let it do what it's going to do.

Yeah, I really love this book. I could talk to you all day. It's called Enough is Enough. The second enough is spelled E-N-U-F. Again, we're here with Gabe Henry. Gabe, where can people find you? GabeHenry.com or on Instagram at Gabe.Henry.

Excellent. Well, and there is so much more to talk about in a bonus segment for our Grammarpalusians. Stay tuned if you're a Grammarpalusian. We're going to talk. I really just want to hear how this book got made. Everything from the research to how you copy edit a book with all these different misspellings in it. So we're going to continue the conversation for the Grammarpalusians. But for everybody else, thank you so much for being here. That's all. Thanks for listening.

This Father's Day helped Dad be all he can be with a gift from the Home Depot. Because he's not just Dad, he's the handyman of the house, the plumber in a pinch, and the emergency mechanic.

Upgrade his gear this Father's Day with the Husky Mechanics 270-piece tool set from The Home Depot. Now on special buy for $119, a $695 value. For every kind of dad, find the perfect gift this Father's Day at The Home Depot.