Do I Have to Spell It Out for You?

Spelling reform has gotten a bad rap—cast usually as an intellectual dead end if not the exclusive domain of cranks and weirdos. It should be noted, however, that more than a few distinguished thinkers have been drawn to this most curious of causes, through which English orthography as we know it might finally be chucked and replaced with a more sensible alternative. Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster, Charles Darwin, and Lord Tennyson are just some of the illustrious figures who have taken up spelling reform with, alas, little to show for their efforts.

At the very least, spelling reform makes for a classic illustration of the difference between what is and what (arguably, anyway) ought to be. This distinction sits cheerfully, though somewhat underexamined, at the heart of Enough is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell, Gabe Henry’s brisk history of efforts to simplify the English writing system.

Henry begins in the 12th century with a monk named Ormin who proposed doubling final consonants in words such as “win” and “fin” to avoid confusion with those homonyms that later came to be spelled with a final, silent E, as in “wine” and “fine.” Taking its title from a protester’s call to action outside the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Enough is Enuf concludes with a playfully admiring look at how simplified spelling has meshed with creative whimsy and the constraints of texting to make recent decades a golden age for nonstandard spelling.

The artist still known as Prince emerges as something of a hero for his alphanumeric substitutions (“I Would Die 4 U”) and his decision, in 1993, to rebrand himself with the unpronounceable, so-called love symbol, which combined male and female into a suggestively post-binary glyph. Henry cites the fact that Prince was the descendant of slaves as a possible reason for his rebellion against letter conventions and quotes yet another self-renamed black American, Malcolm X, who said, “In order for a man to really understand himself he must … [have] a language of his own.”

A language of his own? Truly? It turns out that Henry has mangled the meaning of this quotation. What Malcolm X actually said was, “In order for a man to really understand himself he must be part of a nation; he must have some land of his own, a God of his own, a language of his own.”

The unedited sentence puts nation before property, religion, and language. Which makes more sense. Individuals do not have languages of their own, though we may occasionally speak of a private language, say, between lovers or, in fictional realms, of an invented language, such as Klingon, which is not private or even copyrighted. Languages may strengthen the bonds of nations, but there can no more be a language of one person than there can be a nation of one person.

This footnote raises an important question for spelling reformers: What is the larger point of tinkering with spelling when you would have to convince other people to go along with your project for it to succeed? And making a case for fixing what is wrong with English spelling is not even the critical, necessary step.

We might all be persuaded by the awkwardness of English spelling without any of us being willing to undertake the massive project of considering alternatives and negotiating our way to a consensus on what to do about the problem. In which case, the problem of spelling might also be described as a problem that would only seem worth fixing in the total absence of other problems.

Yet between the medieval monk and rock royalty waves of language reformers have come forward, volunteering their ideas on how to make English spelling easier to learn and more efficient. The 19th century and the Progressive Era stand out in particular for their interest in spelling reform. New writing systems such as shorthand were often championed in milieus where other movements flourished as well. Henry describes all too briefly something called the New York Free Love League, which seems to have been a highfalutin sex club. It was a magnet, Henry writes, “for a particular type of high-society New Yorker: the Social Reformer. There were vegetarians and teetotalers, suffragists and shorthanders, pacifists and socialists, all united by a common vision of social progress.”

One can’t help but wonder about this overlap between advocates of spelling reform and the supporters of other movements, particularly abolitionism. Was there anything behind this coincidence? True, in both spelling reform and abolitionism, there was an emphasis on literacy. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass memorably described his own learning to read as a major step toward his self-liberation.

But these causes are not equal. Spelling reform and abolitionism hardly seem to belong in the same sentence except to say, perhaps, that both types of reformers sought to make a break with the past. Maybe the answer is that people who have decided to question one set of conventions are predisposed to question others. That or there is a mechanism in the reform-minded brain that sees value not only in micromanaging little things like letters on a page but in rewriting major social arrangements, suggesting a kind of continuum between the noodge and the prophet, the minor buttinsky and the hero or villain of our times.

Theodore Roosevelt might be described as both a major reformer and a minor know-it-all. Better known for his trust-busting and building the Panama Canal, Roosevelt sought in 1906 to introduce 300 new spellings, recommended by the Simplified Spelling Board, into all government publications through the Government Printing Office. T.R. was then mocked relentlessly by the press. It went on for months until the Public Printer reversed course, issuing instructions that government printing should follow standard orthography.

Reviewing the history of attempts to reform English spelling does not leave one persuaded that it needs reforming. In fact, I have never felt so at peace with English’s hard-to-remember spellings, which are just the long record of quirky precedents and forgotten adjustments that accumulated over centuries to bring us to where we are now. What we do with English seems far more important than how it is spelled.

Enough is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell
by Gabe Henry
Dey Street Books, 288 pp., $28

David Skinner, the former editor of Humanities magazine, writes about language, history, and culture.

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