How can it be that “laughter” and “daughter” not only don’t rhyme but don’t sound remotely alike? What about “tomb,” “bomb,” and “comb”? Meanwhile, “liar” and “choir,” which couldn’t look more different, do rhyme. How and why is the English language so messed up? And why haven’t we done anything about it?
In Enough is Enuf, writer Gabe Henry wittily and engagingly confronts all of these questions head-on and arrives at a surprising answer: We actually have tried, on many occasions across numerous generations, to standardize English spelling. We just haven’t (yet) succeeded much.
As Henry observes, “legions of rebel wordsmiths have died on the hill of spelling reform, risking their reputations to bring English into the realm of the rational.” He dedicated his book to these brave souls, including Mark Twain, Noah Webster, and Benjamin Franklin. In all cases, tragically, despite initial interest, these efforts foundered on the shoals of traditional notions of orthography.
But first, Henry explores how English spelling found itself in such a parlous state and points to the linguistic and historical origins of our conundrum. Part of the challenge resides in the unfortunate fact that English possesses 26 letters expected to account for 44 distinct sounds. “To make up for those missing 18 phonemes,” Henry explains, “some letters are forced to work multiple jobs.” Thus, “c” forms the different sounds in “cup,” “lace,” and “charge,” while “h” is responsible for “honor,” “thicket,” and “laugh.”
At the same time, Henry reckons that each sound in the English language allows for four ways of spelling, on average. Think “cat,” which in theory could be spelled with a “q,” a “k,” or even a “ch.” English emerged as an amalgam of Celtic (of which only about 100 words remain, including “bog” and “glen”), Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and French. German and Romance influences have battled for centuries for primary control of our language, with uniform grammar and orthography the most severe casualties. In the 11th century, following the Norman invasion, the language became unintelligible even among many of its speakers.
The first attempted salvation arrived in 1550, when John Cheke, tutor to then-12-year-old King Edward VI, outlined a seven-point plan to simplify English. His recommendations included removing the silent “e” at the end of words, removing unpronounced consonants (such as the “b” in “debt”), and duplicating vowels to indicate a long sound (such as “maad” instead of “made”). But Cheke’s proposals attracted little attention, and he wound up imprisoned after backing the unsuccessful coup of Lady Jane Grey.
Centuries later, in 1768, Franklin tried his hand, somewhat half-heartedly, at normalizing English spelling, by eliminating “c,” “j,” “q,” “x,” and “w,” and replacing them with six new letters that made sounds such as “aw,” “ish,” and “eth.” However, the interlocutor to whom Franklin presented his suggestions was unmoved. It would erase etymologies, render obsolete “all the books already written,” and erase “the distinction … between words of different meaning & similar sound,” a contemporary said. In short, they concluded, “We must let people spell on in their own way.”
Eighteen years later, Webster, a young grammarian and budding lexicographer, picked up Franklin’s mantle. He argued patriotically, “Language, as well as government, should be national … America should have her own distinct from all the world.” Webster’s early ideas included substituting “f” for “gh,” “k” for “ch,” and double-vowels for the silent “e” at the end of words so that “no person could mistake their true pronunciation.”
For this, Webster endured a hail of imprecations, the most polite of which might have been from Jeremy Belknap, who joined others in “reprobating the … new mode of spelling ov No-ur Webstur eskwier junier.” However, Webster plowed ahead, successfully abolishing, in his pioneering American Dictionary of the English Language, the “u” in “honour” and “favourite,” the “me” at the end of “programme,” and the “ugh” in “draught,” among other signature edits. But he didn’t make much more headway than that.
The 19th century saw the emergence of similar efforts often tied to other causes, including Brigham Young’s endeavor to create “a new and original set of characters” in the nascent (and controversial) Mormon State of Deseret (now Utah); the push by Eliza Burnz (nee Burns) for “phonetic spelling” as part of the fight for suffrage; and the campaign by liberated slave Joseph B. Towe to forge a simplified language to empower his fellow black Americans.
At the turn of the century, no less impressive figures than Twain and former President Theodore Roosevelt took up the fight. Twain sought to purge “the present clumsy and ragged forms” that he deemed “grotesque to the eye and revolting to the soul,” including “insane” words such as phthisis, pneumonia, diphtheria, and pterodactyl. Roosevelt at one point ordered the Government Printing Office to spell “all Government publications of the Executive Departments the 300 words enumerated” in circulars of the Simplified Spelling Board. But Roosevelt and Twain became laughingstocks for their labors, and “Ruzevelt Speling” swiftly fell out of favor.
Others picked up the mantle, though. Col. Robert McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune, decided to “carry out the most effective newspaper campaign in the history of simplified spelling, bestowing upon all Chicagoans the terms ‘hocky,’ ‘demagog,’ ‘fantom,’ ‘staf,’ and ‘thru.’” But upon his death, and in the face of a slow-boiling reader revolt, the paper reversed course in a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger article announcing that “sanity some day may come to spelling, but we do not want to make any more trouble.” George Bernard Shaw also implemented what he considered a simplified alphabet that, somewhat confusingly, employed “tall,” “deep,” “short,” and “compound” letters. But his innovation also fizzled.
So, is logical English spelling doomed? As Henry puts it, “As they present their ideas to the unsuspecting public, they find that change, especially in language, faces stiff resistance from a society rooted in tradition.” In the best case, he says, “The world will respond to their proposal with a collective shrug of indifference. In the worst case, it’ll unleash upon the reformer a sustained barrage of mockery and scorn that forever tarnishes their name and reduces their legacy to a punchline.”
But it’s not all gloom and doom. Among the more successful simplification campaigns have been those promulgated by product advertisers, especially in children’s products. Play-Doh, Froot Loops, and Cocoa Krispies reflect how, “as the counterculture rebelled against tradition, so did the marketing teams at Playskool and Mattel, who embraced the playful, free-spirited spelling of the time over the rigid orthography of yore.”
Then, musicians such as Snoop Dogg, Sinead O’Connor, and Prince (who famously changed his name to a symbol) found themselves on the cutting edge of lyrics and titles utilizing numbers, pictures, and abbreviations — especially “u” for “you.” And perhaps most significantly, millennial and Gen Z texters have cultivated an entire language with a simplified logic all its own. “OMG” and “LOL” have cracked the Oxford English Dictionary, and emojis now grace the pages of the notoriously stodgy New Yorker.
So perhaps spelling normalization has a future, provided linguistic change reflects authentic desires and needs.
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“Language doesn’t evolve from the top down,” Henry concludes. “It comes from the bottom, from the people, particularly the younger ones, who walk around with their phones in their fingers and their fingers on the pulse of the culture.”
Maybe there’s hope yet.
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of Like Silicon From Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI