"A brief and humorous 500-year history of the Simplified Spelling Movement from advocates like Ben Franklin, C. S. Lewis, and Mark Twain to texts and Twitter"-- - (Baker & Taylor)

A brief and humorous 500-year history of the Simplified Spelling Movement from advocates like Ben Franklin, C. S. Lewis, and Mark Twain to texts and Twitter.

Why does the G in George sound different from the G in gorge? Why does C begin both case and cease? And why is it funny when a philologist faints, but not polight to laf about it? Anyone who has ever had the misfortune to write in English has, at one time or another, struggled with its spelling.

So why do we continue to use it? If our system of writing words is so tragically inconsistent, why haven’t we standardized it, phoneticized it, brought it into line? How many brave linguists have ever had the courage to state, in a declaration of phonetic revolt: “Enough is enuf”? 

The answer: many. In the comic annals of linguistic history, legions of rebel wordsmiths have died on the hill of spelling reform, risking their reputations to bring English into the realm of the rational. This book is about them: Mark Twain, Ben Franklin, Eliza Burnz, C. S. Lewis, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Darwin, and the innumerable others on both sides of the Atlantic who, for a time in their life, became fanatically occupied with writing thru instead of through, tho for though, laf for laugh, beleev for believe, and dawter for daughter (and tried futilely to get everyone around them to do it too). 

Henry takes his humorous and informative chronicle right up to today as the language seems to naturally be simplifying to fit the needs of our changing world thanks to technology—from texting to Twitter and emojis, the Simplified Spelling Movement may finally be having its day.

Booklist Reviews

Both linguists and common users can agree that English spellings are . . . strange. Henry dissects the aims of various movements to assuage this difficulty, from saving ink and paper to creating a better experience for international English learners; cultivating easier and faster fluency for schools to speed up proficiency. The 1800s saw the most experimentation and reform, widening the schism between British and American English with the publication of such tomes as Noah Webster's dictionary. Unsurprisingly, more subtle attempts to streamline English were the ones that really took hold in popular culture. While some poked fun and "laffed" at reformers' attempts, others tried to invent new alphabets altogether or use numbers to represent sounds. Ultimately, the National Education Association served as the gatekeeper to language reform as others failed due to socioeconomic forces beyond their control. School spelling bees drove home the point that, while "difikult 2 spel," English could be mastered and even celebrated for all its quirks. Henry's wide-ranging exploration of adventures in English will be entertaining for the lay reader and perhaps inspire new reformers for our quirky living language. Copyright 2025 Booklist Reviews.

Publishers Weekly Reviews

"Anyone who has the misfortune to write in English" has struggled with its spelling, quips humorist Henry (Eating Salad Drunk) in this amusing overview of historical attempts to bring order to the madness. He explains that "simplified spelling" advocates have popped up repeatedly since the 12th century, when a monk named Ormin got bothered by written English's inability to distinguish between short and long vowels—a problem finally solved in the 16th century with the addition of a silent e at the end of long-vowel words, but which Ormin tried to solve by doubling the consonants that follow short vowels: after becomes "affterr," living becomes "livvinng." ("Simpler? No. Practical? Not particularly," Henry notes.) Other simplified spellers range from John Cheke, royal tutor to Henry VIII's children, who became fixated on removing "silent Latin letters" ("the superfluous B's and C's in words like doubt and indict," which, readers will be annoyed to learn, had themselves been shoehorned into the language by medieval scholars who had tried to simplify English by making it look more like Latin), to Melvill Dewey, the 19th-century founder of the Spelling Reform Association, who wrote that "we hav the most unsyentifik, unskolarli, illojikal & wasteful speling ani languaj ever ataind." Henry's wry survey amounts to a compendium of obsessives—smart people who became "fanatically" preoccupied with "writing laf instead of laugh." It's a delight. (Apr.)