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This is Rebecca Buchanan, host of New Books Network, New Books and Popular Culture. And today I'm here with Gabe Henry, who's the author of Enough is Enough, Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell. Gabe, thanks for being here with me today. Thank you for having me, Rebecca. Could you start by kind of explaining how this book came to be, what it's about, like what you were interested in about sort of this spelling and the ways we spell the English language?
Well, the simplified spelling movement, for those who don't know, and many people don't know because it is quite obscure, it was an underground campaign that spanned hundreds of years, and its goal was to try to shorten and simplify spelling. For instance, spelling laugh, L-A-F, love, L-U-V, though, T-H-O. And many people...
prominent people became involved in this movement. Noah Webster, the father of the American dictionary, Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain. And I first heard about this movement back in college. Very briefly, the professor didn't... The professor didn't talk about it too much, but I remember filing it away for something I want to write about one day. And my first initial thought about simplified spelling was that it is ridiculous.
It is silly looking. Visually, it looks like a child is writing it or a teenager. But it wasn't until years later when I actually started digging into the movement and reading through the archives and the journals and the newspapers that I realized how rich and complex it really was. brought in a range of people, characters, some of whom were brilliant, and some of whom were clearly out of their mind. but they all shared this belief that they could
they could improve society in some small way by changing the way we spell. So I knew I wanted to bring that movement to life and these characters to life. And I also wanted to explore how sometimes these really tiny efforts to change our world, even if they seem to be unsuccessful in the moment, they have these ripple effects throughout history. I found it really fascinating. But yes, as someone who is an English professor and I tell my students every semester.
I'm like, I can't spell like you're going to see me write and it's going to be a mess. And you can figure out what I wrote, even if I can't write, even if my I is not before my E or whatever. And I put an E instead of an A, you're still going to know the word. That's fine. You can get over it. I'm like, that's what spell check is for.
But and I'm sure many people would be like, you can't say that. But so you go through this. It's like super fascinating. And to talk about. So I'm like, can we start? kind of at the very beginning because you kind of set up English and thinking about English and... Well, even British English as needing to be or how we sort of it came to be. I don't know if that's the best way to say it. But can we can you talk a little bit about sort of ground us in.
why this discussion even started, sort of how the English language came to be and we got to this place. Yeah. English spelling is absurd. It is the most phonetically inconsistent language spelling that we have. If you look at romance languages, most romance languages have this one-to-one letter-to-sound correspondence. If you look at languages throughout the world, if you teach a child what one letter sound makes,
they'll remember it forever, and there are very few instances where they'll have to renegotiate that spelling. So in most languages, the letter C makes the sound of a C. In our language, C could be... The sound of an S, it could be the sound of a K, it could be silent, it could make some weird ch sound. And the reason for the inconsistency of the English spelling... The early period of the Celts and the Romans were talking about.
BC, 300 BC to 100 BC. This is a period where England was, it was pummeled by a series of invasions, settlements. conquests. And over time, all the language of the conquerors merged and morphed and mingled into this weird hodgepodge we have. So Celtic morphed with Latin, Latin morphed with German. Then the Vikings come, and the Norse and the Danish language merges, and then the French come. over time, we
We merge these spellings and these syntaxes and grammars into what we try to think of as one language, English. But really, it's more like eight languages in a trench coat. But I mean, it's not really fooling anyone. So in the 1500s, 1600s, people started coming out spelling reformers saying, hey, our spelling is so inconsistent. It's so unreliable. We need to do something to make it more effortless.
spellers for readers, especially once literacy becomes more ubiquitous. So some of the proposals are, let's take out letters. Let's take out the silent E at the ends of words. Let's take out the silent B in debt, the silent B in doubt. which makes a lot of logical sense. I think most people would agree. But the idea that you can impose this new way of doing things almost overnight to a huge populace.
is very impractical. And over and over again, these spelling reformers hit that same wall, that wall of practicability, of pragmatism. And in the end, this movement, the simplified spelling movement is really, it's a history of failures. It's a history of futility. And that's one of the things I find so incredible about it and so hilarious about it. And it's been an absolute pleasure just digging into hundreds of years of these really tunnel visioned.
single idea people who really committed their lives to doing something that was never going to catch on. Well, and it's like you said, you wanted to kind of show these characters and it's so fascinating because there are. so many interesting people that spent a lot of time coming up with Some, like you said, some make sense and some ideas like how we would give every letter a number or there was somewhere there's a grid of like one through nine and you figure out the letter to the number.
So some things that are really, really difficult. But some things from this sort of simplified... spelling space actually worked and and let's talk about some of those failures first but then we can talk maybe about like shorthand which came about because of this and became actually something that people use um but early on You even have these battles between...
British English and American English and the simplified spellers in both areas and that kind of thing. So can you talk a little bit about some of the early... or characters or sort of controversies that you found especially interesting in this? Yeah. So the interesting thing about simplified spelling is that whatever belief
or biases you have going into it, you tend to see it reflected back onto you. So if you're viewing simplified spelling through the lens of social reform, you're going to see it as a tool for social reform. If you're viewing it In through the lens of profit and business and capitalistic intentions, you're going to see that reflected back. So Noah Webster came to this idea for spelling reform because he was trying to. Find a new American language.
America had just won its independence from England, and it was trying in many ways to... distinguish its own identity, distinguish its own language, distinguish its own way of doing things, because it didn't want to continue using the culture and the language of its oppressor. So around the 1780s, there were many proposals for what should the new English language be. Some people proposed French.
But Noah Webster's idea was instead of completely overhauling English, you just change the way we spell. So we would spell in American English, not British English. And this was his version of. unifying identifier for the new country. And he proposed a series of radical reforms in 1789. Most of them were ignored or mocked, laughed at.
Because, like I said before, it does look pretty silly on the page. It really does look like it's dumbed down English or written by a five-year-old. So he withdrew his proposal for these radical extreme reforms, but... They ended up coming through, or at least some of them did, into our language 20 years later when he publishes Webster's Dictionary. What he was able to do is instead of pushing for these extreme reforms, he incorporated some of the more moderate simplifications that he had been.
pushing forward in 1789. These are words like color and honor without a U, draft and plow spelled without that British G-H. And once his dictionary became widely read, these spellings gained legitimacy and they became part of what we know as American English. The source of them was patriotic, American, new country, new nation. This is who we are, and we're not going to be like the British.
So and it's so interesting that like the dictionary and and what he did and creating the dictionary kind of ties in with this movement. And he's not the only one you also talk about. And I did not know some of the history of John Dewey and the Dewey Decimal System and all that. So can you talk because that also. Some of it ties into this movement. So can you talk about Dewey and what Dewey was trying to do as well and how he got himself canceled, right, in our terms? Melville Dewey.
As anyone born before 1995 knows, founder of the Dewey Decimal System, our classification system for library books. He founded the American Library Association. He founded many smaller library associations in New York, in the Northeast. And for a few years, let's say a decade, he was... He was honored for giving women jobs. He was kind of seen as this progressive figure who were offering women librarian jobs.
increasing their role in the workforce and seen as as this ally let's let's say um of course he went through his own me too cancellation so in 1906 he And he was called out by about four women for harassment, people that he had worked with. And they called him out on this after this big Alaska cruise. organized by the American Library Association. It was physical. It was transactional. It was, even for 1906, it was beyond the threshold of what people would allow.
He was kicked out of the American Library Association, kicked out of his other positions, basically forced to retreat to this resort he had in upstate New York, Lake Placid, and never really let allowed into. decent American society again. That was his personal story. His cross with simplification was he was a very fastidious...
pedantic person. He tried to do everything in tens. He was obsessed with this number 10. So not just his library system, but he tried to write 10 page letters. He tried to sleep 10 hours every night. And his other obsession was with efficiency and productivity and simplification. This is how he's drawn to simplified spelling.
our way of language to be as scientific and simple as possible. He doesn't like the idea that one word can be spelled in one way and then a homonym or a homophone can be spelled in another way. So he helped found the Spelling Reform Association in America in 1876. letters for decades in simplified spelling. He even shortened the spelling of his own name. This was something that a lot of these obsessive reformers would do. They would turn the simplification upon themselves.
He cut two letters out of his first name, three letters out of his last name. And the version of his first name we still use today is his simplified version. It cuts off the L-E at the end. He... In upstate New York, he had this Lake Placid resort, which eventually would go on to host the Winter Olympic Games. To this day, I believe that there are plaques and there's...
indications that everything in this resort used to be in simplified spelling. Everything used to be phonetic, and it was just known that if you were going to stay at this resort as a guest, you would have to be subject to Dewey's obsessive... fundamentalist, alphabetic obsession. So we've got this kind of like, you know, folks like that. But I also love. how much the spelling movement
at times becomes attached to sort of justice issues, vegetarianism, anti-slavery, the abolitionist movement, the temperance movement. So can you talk a little bit, right, sort of around these, you know, during this sort of early... Like late 1800s, early 1900s, it becomes attached to or part of all these other movements that are looked at really radical at the time.
and have seemed to continue in the ways that the spelling movement has not. Can you talk a little bit about that connection? So in the... Mid-1800s, simplified spelling tended to overlap with these other countercultural movements. So if you were, let's say, a spelling reformer in 1850, there was a strong likelihood you would also be involved in the movements for vegetarianism, for homeopathy, for alcohol temperance.
And most prominent of all, abolition. Many abolitionists viewed simplified spelling as a tool to accelerate literacy among newly freed slaves. In those years after the Civil War, many spelling reformers and even some former slaves traveled the South teaching the phonetic rudiments of simplified spelling to these newly freed. It's like I said before, whatever...
Whatever lens you're looking at it at simplified spelling through, you're going to see that reflected back. There's a Rorschach quality to it. If you're... a social reformer, you're going to see it for its social reform value. If you're a businessman, money minded, profit driven, you're going to see it for its profit value. And if you're trying to distinguish a new American identity, you're going to see it for its patriotic value. It really is a neutral thing that attracted left, right.
Democratic, Republican, conservative, liberal, progressive, everything. Because It had this mirror quality. It mirrored yourself back to you. Yeah. And, you know, as I was reading and I was thinking about that. There's a, especially today, but I mean, it's been going on for a long time. There's movements for kind of.
for thinking about linguistic justice, right, and African-American vernacular English, and how, and so seeing some of these patterns as well, and when you talk about... how formerly enslaved peoples were sometimes taught to do some of the simplified spelling, and that in combination with some of the oral histories, you kind of see, I'm sure, linguists. And I am not an expert linguist at all, but see some of those patterns and some of those ways in which...
these movements kind of, I don't know, I don't know if mirror each other is the right way to say it, but there are some connections to some of them. I think the connection, it's big and bold, the word literacy. literacy in a democratic society is very important if you want a voice in society if you want to give intellectual freedom to someone it's literacy it's the ability to read and learn on their own
And what keeps people from literacy? Certain barriers like bad spelling systems. The fact that... you grew up as a poor speller, or people with dyslexia have the inability to grasp our spelling, or people who just don't have the benefit of the educational privileges that other people do. They are stigmatized for a long time.
Especially as children, they're stigmatized. They're stigmatized as poor spellers into adulthood. And I think they're self-stigmatized. You know, the first time you hear someone, a teacher tell you at six years old that you're a bad speller, you keep that. intellectual inferiority with you for a long time. Some people compensate and overcome it. A lot of people don't. And I think that's inherently not a good thing. I think that we should get rid of that stigma.
I don't know how to get rid of that stigma, but I think that the stigma holds a lot of people back. a lot of communities back. And if the goal is literacy and education, we should be finding the common denominator. Yes. A hundred thousand percent. Yes. You know, and as you're talking, one of the things I thought was really interesting is you bring in the spelling bee in here.
Because we're thinking about education and literacy and sort of how that movement and how at the same time the simplified spelling was going on, there was this big push. for the spelling bee and the national spelling bee and you kind of talk and i thought that kind of history and the history of the first winner of the national spelling bee was super fascinating so can you talk a little bit about how the spelling bee plays a role in all of this as well.
First of all, we're celebrating the 100th year anniversary of the script spelling bee right now. So it's a good year to be talking about this. But the first American national spelling bee was in 1908. And this was right after the peak of the simplified spelling movement. So only two years earlier, 1906. Theodore Roosevelt pledges his loyalty to this new cause of spelling reform.
And he directs his presidential stenographer to recast all correspondence and communication of the Oval Office in simplified spelling. He takes another step and tries to... executive orders to make this part of the federal workforce entirely. that everyone would from now on would start using these simplified words. And these are words like though, T-H-O, and through, T-H-R-U. Also a lot of past tense words like kissed would be K-I-S-T, missed would be M-I-S-T, I missed you.
And for three months in 1906, he was just subjected to the most... most unforgiving political cartoons and mockery in the press. And it turned simplified spelling suddenly changed it from this. This niche reform movement pushed by educators, professors, and it turned it into a big central conversation in American society. It raised the visibility of simplified spelling.
And what many people were worried about was that if the president of the United States is a simplified speller and if he has the ability to to pass laws to get it. to be legal, to not just legal, but get the National Education Association behind it, get certain newspapers behind it, then it has a strong chance of actually catching on. And what happened in 1908 with the first...
national spelling competition in America was that it was a rebuttal, a soft rebuttal, but a response. And what they were trying to say with this was, We're trying to reassert the dominance of traditional American spelling. We're trying to make difficult spelling a something that you can not run something you don't want to run away from but something you want to master something you want to compete doing it's almost a taking this difficult, complicated thing and turning into a game, a puzzle.
And because it was on this national level, it had this national relevance. It also had global relevance because they're basically saying to the world, this is how we spell in English. This is American society. are owning it instead of running away from it. And this is, we're going to show those simplified spellers once and for all that.
This is the traditional standard that we're going to keep and we're going to use and we're going to teach children how to use. And those children are going to love competing in it.
So we have this kind of like this spelling bee, this reform. Another thing that comes from this, and I mentioned it earlier that I'd love for you to talk about a little, is shorthand, right? So there's all these things that don't... work or I mean that that are failures but um shorthand is does not become a failure right it becomes something that is actually used and so can you talk a little bit about that and how that came to be as part of this movement
Right. So the shorthand that was most popular in the 1800s was Pittman shorthand. And into the 1900s, even this was used mostly in Britain by stenographers. typists, secretaries. Many of our parents or grandparents grew up learning how to use this. And this was a series of Lines, dots, squiggles, slashes, dashes, and each one corresponded to a different phoneme, a different sound. And the idea was that using shorthand, using Pittman's shorthand, you can...
transcribe spoken language at the speed of spoken language. You weren't able to do that before writing in longhand, even writing in simplified spelling. And Pittman's initial idea for this came out of simplified spelling. He converted early on to this idea that we should use fewer letters in our words, more phonetic spellings. And he evolved from that thinking into, well, what's the bottom most denominator? What's the, once you reduce language to it.
simplest alphabetic blocks. Can you reduce it any further? And he thought, yes, you can obliterate the alphabet entirely. Just reduce it to... hand-drawn motions on the paper, and that could convey an entire work. So this was most prominently used and it became very popular in the 1860s, especially with women. Women entered the workforce as stenographers, as men vacated it fighting in the Civil War.
And stenography and shorthand transformed into this almost exclusively female skill and profession. And so we have this going on. And then, so the other thing, when we move into sort of more... modern language and thinking about that. money becomes the important thing, right? You used to really talk about how like advertising as that kind of thing are really what is at the forefront of
how we have changed or think about spelling differently. So can you talk a little bit about that, like the 50s, the 60s, and what was going on during that time to get us to moving us closer to where we are today? Right. Well, what happened after Theodore Roosevelt joined the movement is simplified spelling started to seep into pop culture more.
it started to be used as a novelty, a gimmick, especially among advertisers. And advertisers loved tweaking a spelling in such a way that it would make passersby linger a little bit longer on that sign. Trying to work it out, what the puzzle is, or maybe just lingering for a second to think this is spelled wrong. It's as simple as that. And if you're trying to distinguish yourself in a crowded field.
And in the 1920s, one of the most popular techniques of simplified advertising was replacing the hard letter C with the letter K. So this is around the time you get Krispy Kreme and Kool-Aid. And linguists at the time had a name for this. They called it the craze for K, and they blamed it directly on the simplified spellers who had been pushing words like character with a K and chorus with a K since the days of Noah Webster.
And you still see this around us today, every time you walk down the grocery aisle. It transformed the way it... It transformed the way that advertisers thought about grabbing attention. You had taglines, slogans, logos, and then of course you have your product. It's almost tertiary. It's everything on the front that is more important. And in the 50s and the 60s, this started creeping into pop music because pop musicians had that same conundrum.
how do we distinguish ourselves in a crowded field And you have bands like The Beatles with an A. The birds with a Y, the monkeys without a Y, up through the 70s, Def Leppard, U2, it goes on and on. And I think it kind of culminates in the 80s with Prince. Yes, yes. Not personally. Yes, I wish.
But yeah, no, I love, yes, let's talk a little bit about Prince because I really love how you use Prince because he is like even the artist formerly known as Prince with, you know, like he uses or he plays with language. In really great, I think, really fun ways. Right. I mean, anyone who's looked at his discography, anyone who's owned one of his records knows he had a unique way of spelling.
utilizing standalone letters and numbers, songs like Nothing Compares to You with the number two letter U, I Would Die for You. And he made this such a part of his brand. that it's almost been meme-ified that you're writing like Prince if you write in this way. And this was obviously decades before this form of spelling entered digital shorthand, texting, social media. He played with language in so many ways, not just in those simplifications, but of course he changed his name to a symbol.
He was really driven to morph and transform language. He saw that, I think, as another canvas for his art. He loved playing. I mean, any songwriter loves language. Any songwriter is looking for that hook. And the writer looking for that hook sometimes finds it in just tearing down those building blocks of language and building them back up in your own unique way. I think that...
That tendency to do that as a pop musician continues today. You see a lot in rap and hip hop. You have, you know, Tupac spelled with a two. You have Questlove spelled with a question mark, ASAP Rocky with a... a dollar sign. It goes on and on. I think you just you look at the Billboard 100 today and you see that technique everywhere. And you kind of end with the discussion of like tech speak. And so I'd love to talk a little bit about how.
some of this has really seeped into what we do, right? So there's still people who, I mean, there's still a movement for changing and simplifying your spelling. I think you opened the book with something about that. But we also, our language has changed. And even though some people don't want it to. So can you talk a little bit about that, like sort of text speak?
How we have kind of, yeah, how we have and young people really have started to change our language permanently. I think that the downstream effects of the simplified spelling movement. are that over time, and especially over the 20th century, with the way it entered pop culture through consumerism, it over time softened our boundaries around traditional spelling. You know, it gave us this...
permission to misspell. And it also gave us the idea that you can misspell and people can still understand it. And I think through advertising, through pop music, through cereal boxes, through Saturday morning cartoons, all of which employed different versions of creative phonetic spelling. It tore down these boundaries that we had between traditional spelling and creative spelling. And by the time that the internet came around, I think it was almost second nature for us to embrace.
spelling shorthand. And I think these days a lot of people will look at texting shorthand or simplified spelling and see it as a loss of tradition or maybe the downfall of English as we know it. And these tend to be the purists. And there's nothing wrong with that. But there are other people that will look at texting and see it as a natural evolution of... language, kind of a reflection of the
the way that language naturally bends to reflect a more interconnected, faster-paced society. That tends to be how I see it. Yeah, one of the things I really appreciate about your book and what you're kind of thinking about is I often say to students, like I work with primarily students are going to be English teachers in high schools.
And I often I'm like, language is not like, you know, the grammar, the mechanics, the spelling, the usage. It changes. It's always changing. And we often think that we're in one time period. And that's how it's going to often have to be here. It always has to be that way. And I'm like, you couldn't read Old England, right? Like, if you look at the patterns, you'll see. And, you know, you talk, I think.
Also about sort of pictographs and like hieroglyphics and all these ways in which we see these changes if we look at it. So you're really showing kind of. Even we don't need to go back 500 years or 600 years. We can go back 100 years or, you know, 150 years and really see some of these changes. And that we are always adding and adapting our language. Yeah. Language is always changing. It always has changed. It always will. And I don't think that there's any such thing as an immutably correct.
version of spelling, a correct version of language. Shakespeare was spelling in a way that's incorrect for us now, and I guarantee we're spelling in a way that will be incorrect. Maybe partially in a few hundred years. I think you have to think in terms of that arc of history, a longer timeline. Maybe in our generation, our lifetime, we won't see it change too much. Maybe we'll see the Oxford English Dictionary absorb a few digital abbreviations, OMG, LOL. But I think fast forward 300 years.
And I promise I will have a podcast with you in 300 years to discuss it. I think that it will continue to shorten and simplify. You know, Noah Webster has... this great quote. I'm paraphrasing a little. He says, the progress of language is like the course of the Mississippi in that essentially it's going to go where it wants to go. It's going to flow the way it wants to flow. And the best we can do is you can stand on that riverbank.
You can observe it. Maybe you can dip a toe in or paddle through it, but you cannot change the direction of that water flow. And I think the direction that water is flowing right now is towards implicit. Yeah. And you kind of, and like, that was one of my sort of final questions for you. But along those lines, like.
Throughout the book, you have all these really great sort of characters that you talk about and that are at the forefront of some of these different ideas. Is there anyone right now that you see or is this more a collective? How are people texting? How are people using sort of social media like Blue Sky or different media platforms where...
Brevity is important, or are there certain people who are really pushing some kind of agenda? We're all the simplified spellers now. We're all Noah Webster, and we're doing it unconsciously. We're doing it democratically and that we all have this vote. Every time I text my friend, see you later. And it's just the letter U for the word you.
I guarantee most people in this world are guilty of this, even the ones that think that they're not. If they look through their phone, they'll see that they are. We're all casting our votes for a simpler way of doing things because... In the digital world, we move fast and speed and efficiency and clarity are the primary concerns, not some traditional... old historical version of things that we stick to just so we can say we're spelling correctly. We are spelling like
F. Scott Fitzgerald spelt. It doesn't quite matter in the long run how close to historical accuracy words are. It matters. how clear they are to your person you're communicating. And if it's one-on-one, if I'm texting one-on-one in an informal way, Just that scenario selects for shorter spelling. And you multiply that by billions of people. And I think we're all of the same mind, even if we're unconsciously of the same mind, that shorter is better.
And I will also say that I love that you can... I can scroll through my phone and see all the ways in which my son and I have, you know, texted back and forth just using images or GIFs or whatever when we're like dissing on each other's football teams or my response is like. Pictures of Keanu Reeves, right? Like in doing different things. And like he so he knows or we have certain relationships. So.
I often get things. I'm a big Vikings fan. He's a big 49ers fan. He keeps sending me crap about how Aaron Rodgers is going to come to the Vikings and then I have to send back stuff. But it's never with words, right? Like we have a long text stream. about how much we both hate Aaron Rodgers and he needs to stay away from everyone. Sorry, Aaron Rodgers, but not sorry.
And it's all images. Right. And so I love that, too, about like thinking about brevity beyond just using words, but also returning to some of that use of image. especially making connections with the right people you know and that kind of thing. Right. If you had a magic button and you could make communication as...
simple and efficient and fast as possible, you would probably have some kind of telekinetic interaction. No words at all. I mean, if you really think about it in this fantastical way. The easiest way for me to communicate a thought to you is just to upload it to you. And we can't do that, at least not yet. But the second best thing we have are our images, videos, memes.
I could probably tell a whole, my sister and I could have a whole conversation just using memes and the conversation can get pretty nuanced and only we would understand it. Now, without images, without videos, without memes, the next best thing, the next tier of simplicity is simplified spelling. Texting the letter U for the word U. Texting the number 2 or 4 for the words 2 and 4.
That would be, if we're still using written language and alphabetical blocks, that would be the quickest, most efficient one. So I could talk to you about this forever, but we won't because I've had you here. But my final question, sort of promotion. So the book comes out the 15th of April, correct? So anything either that you want to sort of self-promote with this book or anything else you're working on? So what do you need people to know?
My God, my website, GabeHenry.com, Instagram, Gabe.Henry. But really, just buy the book. Love the book. Treasure it. Buy many copies. And honestly, this is something I only try to write books that I want to see be written. I am always the ideal audience member for the book. My hope is that I'm not the only one in the.
I really hope that I'm tapping into something that is liked and loved generally across the board. So, I mean, I don't know when this interview will come out. When we're recording it, the book comes out in 11 days. That's my countdown. That's when I find out whether I'm the only one who likes this idea or whether it's shared broadly.
I hope it's shared broadly, right? Again, Gabe, thanks for talking with me. Gabe Henry, Enough is Enough, our failed attempts to make English easier to spell. Thanks for being on New Books Network. Thank you, Rebecca.