April 19, 2025 • 20 mins
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 phonologist falls, but not polight to laf about it? Anyone who has the misfortune to write in English will, every now and then, struggle with its spelling. According to a study in the British Journal of Psychology, children take 2-3 times longer to grasp English spelling compared to more phonetic orthographies like German and Spanish. 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. ENOUGH IS ENUF: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell (April 15, 2025; Dey Street) is about them: Noah Webster, Theodore Roosevelt, 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). Releasing from a staple of the New York Comedy Scene-Gabe Henry, whose previous book of haikus featured comics like Jerry Seinfeld and Aubrey Plaza and was lauded for its "wit and wisdom" (Dick Cavett) and "pure fun" (The Interrobang)-ENOUGH IS ENUF reveals how, and why, language is organically simplifying to fit the needs of our changing world. "Just look at our national spelling bee," Henry said in a recent interview with BIG THINK. "There's a whole glorification of complicated words. People pride themselves on mastering the complications and origins of our words. They want to hold onto that. The core of the book is that language is always changing - whether consciously or unconsciously, whether direction or indirectly - and no one should fight it. Language has to evolve just like culture, just like people. It's hard to accept because we want to exert control over the things around us, but it's like letting a child grow up. It's just the natural course." Henry's intelligent yet approachably laugh-out-loud humor will appeal to fans of Nine Nasty Words, Semicolon, and The Pun Also Rises, and the timing couldn't be better with the 100th anniversary of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which Henry covers annually, happening soon after publication. Thanks to technology-from texting to Twitter and emojis-the Simplified Spelling Movement may finally be having its day.and etymologists, linguists, and book lovers alike will be keen to learn mor!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Good morning, Gabe. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Did great? How you do an arrow?
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Absolutely fantastic. Do you look at yourself as being a
word smith because you really dive into a lot of
things here that it's like, oh my god, this guy
is like me. I like to just dig in and
find out the research that you know that goes into
just just you know, looking at the roots of a word.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
I'm a word nerd. I love language. A word smith.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
That sounds like being an expert on language, and I
think we're all experts on language. I think we're all
wordsmiths because it is the skill set you use every
time you open your mouth, every time you text a friend,
every time you pull up pen and paper, And in
terms of expertise level, we all have this first person
expertise and I don't think that so, yeah, I could
(00:48):
call myself a wordsmith just like you could.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Well. I was listening to a podcast yesterday, SmartLess with
with all those actors and things, and one of the
things that they talked about in their opening rounds was
that that every word in the dictionary, every definition in
the dictionary, is actually featured in that dictionary, and that
defines the word infinity.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
So it's a cycle that just feeds itself. It's turtles
all the way down.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Isn't that crazy?
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (01:18):
But have we become lazy spellers because I have been
quoted so many times seeing because of spell check, I
am a lazy speller. But I'm traveling in a heartbeat.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
I don't think it's laziness.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
I think when you're typing to a friend and it's
one on one and it's informal, and you take out
a few letters of the word though if you wish
them good night and you type it n ite, I
don't think that's lazy. I think that's just the natural
course that language takes and should take, because the shortest
distance between two people if you're communicating, is a simple,
(01:54):
straightforward way, and if you're trying to communicate something efficiently
and simply, you're just going to take the shortest course
to it. And you see that in spoken language too,
with the way we turn the whole phrases into short
slang words like I'll tell I'll say my friend's up
instead of saying what is up?
Speaker 2 (02:13):
How are you doing?
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Language will shorten and simplify until it finds its ideal.
Simplest form is that your way of saying that we're
going to go back to the caveman grunt. Maybe it
comes full circle like that, Maybe we go from written
language to emojis.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
To cave drawings.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Wow. The book we're talking about is enough is enough
e in uf, which I just thought that is so
creative of you to put that on there. Was it
your idea?
Speaker 3 (02:44):
Uh, I'll take credit for the title, but I won't
take credit for that spelling. That spelling comes to us
from Noah Webster back in seventeen eighty nine. He came
up with this proposal to simplify, streamline and shorten all
our words, or most of our words, and e n
uf was one of his ideas, along with spelling laugh
(03:05):
laf though thho also tongue t ung.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
They weren't all winners, but he he.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Thirty years later he created the American Dictionary. He's the
Noah Webster we know today, But if he had his
way back in seventeen eighty nine, we might all be
spelling enough e n uf.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Wow. My wife was a school teacher and they constantly
told her, let those students spell the way that they feel.
In other words, if that's the way that they you know,
can bring that word out, they're gonna They're still going
to learn more. But if you challenge them because of
their spelling, that creates a block in the head.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
That is a school of thought that when a child
is learning how to spell, that they should explore that
jungle solo. They should because if they want to establish
this lifelong connection between letters and sounds, symbols and phonemes,
that they they need to do that exploration on their
own early on. And then there's other schools of thought
(04:05):
that say, if you let them do that too long,
if you don't correct them when they spell word wrong,
they're going to grow up with this barrier between what
they know and what they feel. And then on the
other side traditional spelling and does it set them up
for failure? Does it set them up for success? There
have been studies, but I know that some schools teach
(04:26):
it one way and some still teach it the other way.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
I feel so guilty about being in the generation that
I am because I've gone through the LOL and the
BRBs and things like that, and today's newer generation would
have no idea what I'm talking about.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
And likewise, they're probably using acronyms that we don't understand exactly.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
That's the thing.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
There's some aspects of this simplifying craze that is exclusive,
that is designed to almost be this code where the
people who understand it, they're on the inside, they're in
the club, and the people on the outside there your
your millennials, your boomers, what have you. And then there's
then there's inclusive simplifications like spelling through thhru where yeah,
(05:13):
where you and me and a five year old and
a non native English speaker can come to this country
and sound it out pretty simply.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Yeah. My friend Al from Costa Rica, he always looks
at me and says, you guys have too many words
in your vocabulary. You need to shorten it down. It's
not a party, it's not a celebration, it's a fiesta.
Stick with it.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
We have too many we have too many linguistic influences
in our history. I think that's the hard why we
have so many synonyms for so many things. It's also
the heart of the reason of why we have so
many pronunciations for ough you.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Have through the tough cough boo. It goes on and
on and.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
In many ways the hodgepodge of English, the fact that
we are this historical relic that encompasses so many things
like a melting pot. A lot of people look at
that and say it's beautiful. Most people, I think, if
they're thinking about language practically, they're looking at that and saying,
come on, there's got to be a better way.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Yeah. Yeah. So do you think texting was a Beatles
moment it changed the planet?
Speaker 3 (06:24):
I think that moment when the Internet came around and
suddenly the reform movement had this vehicle for informal, bottom up,
organic simplification, I think that changed a lot.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Now it's only.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
Been twenty thirty years that we're living in this digital
age with this digital shorthand the texting, social media.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
I don't know where it goes from there.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
My guess is what we're seeing is this upswell of
bottom up democratic spelling simplification, where every year Webster's Dictionary
adds a new simplification into their pages, where it's like lol, OMG,
those are now in Websters, those are now English Dictionary.
(07:09):
Over time, maybe not in our lifetimes, but I think
the future will maybe two hundred three hundred years, will
have a much more simple version of spelling, and I'll
come back on your show in three hundred years about it.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
It's not that I'm a curmudgeon here, but I do
blame American businesses on many reasons why people are bad spellers.
You can drive down the road and see how these
businesses try to spell their name, and I understand it.
It's marketing, but it's teaching people, Oh, that must be
how you spell it.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
I think that the marketers, the advertisers, they latched onto
misspelling very early on. In the early nineteen hundreds, you
start to see this big craze for deliberate misspelling.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
I think they saw.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
It as this novelty that would catch the eyes of shoppers.
You know, like you said, you're driving down the highway,
you see a bored and misspelled that's gonna catch your eye,
That's going to hold your attention just split second longer.
And in the nineteen twenties, there was this big fad
for replacing the hard letters C and birds with a K.
(08:14):
So brands branded themselves as Kleenex with a K, Krispy Kreme,
you got your kit Kats. Linguists at the time even
had a name for this fad. They called it the
craze for k and they they blamed it on the
simplified spellers who had just been confusing people for so
many hundreds of years.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Yeah, well look at George and Gorge. I mean it
really is. It's like, oh, oh, we got a problem
with this one. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Uh, and that's that's a simple one. There are so
many more complicated. I mean, you said the word curmudgeon before.
Yeahs ask a six year old to spell that if
they haven't been the word before.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
I have to look at other length. I have to
look it up every time.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
There's a lot of letters in there.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
I don't there's a D in there. I don't think
you need in there for one thing. So many words
are so complicated in our language. Most other languages don't
have that problem.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Oh we're just getting started with Gave Henry. Please do
not move. Thanks for coming back to my conversation with
word historian Gabe Henry. My guilty pleasure word is a lot.
I like making that one word. I cannot stand it
on a page when it's two words.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
You know you do you do in the radio format.
I don't think anyone would see you see how you
spell that word.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
If you're saying it out loud.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
I think you just follow your heart.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
It's so funny you say that, because my last book,
what I did was I wrote it in the language
of the way I speak, only because Mark Twain in
his autobiography talked about that we don't need to lose
our accent through writing. So I put a lot of
periods and commas in places that would really piss off
at school teacher. But but I was doing me like
you just said.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Mark Twain was an interesting guy. I mean, he loved language,
but he never saw it as static. He never loved
the status quo. He thought language was malleable, like you said.
He wrote Uncle Berry Finn from the point of view
of a low class Southern boy who doesn't he's not
that literate, he's not well spoken, and he wrote in
(10:26):
this dialectical dialect speak, which is similar to phonetic spelling.
He used some phonetic spellings in that dialect to kind
of connote that this boy was from a low class
and Mark Twain lent his name and his support to
a lot of the simplified spelling movement. He was one
(10:46):
of the founders of the Simplified Spelling Board in nineteen
oh six, which was the moment where simplified spelling went
from this niche his niche education reform social reform movement
and turns it into this pop culture phenomenon where you
start to see it more in advertising and in newspaper
headlines and people everywhere seem to be shortening and simplifying.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
And that was Mark Twain set that off.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Wow, So do the British spell the words correctly? Or
do we spell it what came first? The chicken or
the egg? I mean, because I mean you can sit
there and you need I mean, can compare British words
with American words and they're not spelled the same.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
No, I'll say one thing first that I don't think
that there's any immutably correct way to spell. I don't
think there's any immutably incorrect way to spell. I think
that if there's only what's correct for a given time.
So Shakespeare was spelling in a way that's incorrect for us.
Now I'm pretty sure we'll be we're spelling in a
(11:48):
way that will be incorrect in the future. But when
it comes to England and America, there they started to
go separate ways in language. In the seventeen eight, seventeen nineties,
and then especially when Webster's Dictionary comes out in eighteen
twenty eight, and Webster was the first one to standardize
(12:09):
these American spellings color and honor without the U, theater
and center ending er rather than R. He took out
a lot of these letters that didn't make sense to
him consistent, and his ultimate drive initially was to simplify
the whole language. But what he ended up getting away
with was these moderate simplifications that are now part of
(12:33):
American English.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
That this sourus is something that really kind of screwed
up my head. When I was putting my second book together,
I utilized that as a tool, and I think I
became addicted to it. Do we need to set that
source aside?
Speaker 2 (12:47):
I love the source. It's a great tool. It's a
maybe people use it as a crutch, yep.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
But I say use it. I say the language. What
I love about the language is that at rainbow of synonyms,
this broad spectrum of different ways you can say things.
I love things. I love the sound of English. Now
I might not love the spelling, but I do love
the sounds. I do love the implications and connotations of
(13:15):
a word over here. I like alliteration. So yeah, I
think the sort the Sai sources, I think they're a
wonderful thing. And I've always had one side. But you know,
next to me as I'm writing, I.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Like it that you said that you like the sound
of of of the words. And I'm so with you
on that because there are many times that my wife
will wait for, you know, to turn on the TV,
and she says, wait till you get in the living room.
I say, no, I want to hear them. I want
to envision them speaking. I want to be able to
see that picture without having to look at what they're presenting.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
It.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
There's a music to it.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
I love the sound of many languages, and there there
are some languages where I don't even have to understand
what they're saying.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
I can still love the sound of it, like like
French or Italian.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
They're sonorous, their musical I like a diverse, varying form
of you know, rhythms and lilts and and just.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
Sounds it does. It can be like music to me.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
So what does a southern accent do to you? Because
down here it goes down a little bit slower than
the rest of the country.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Well, I don't know if it's quite up there with French,
but I do love the diverse accents in this country.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
I mean, I'm from Brooklyn, New York.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
I order coffee like like it offended.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Me, but but I love hearing.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
I love hearing Chicago accent of accent an accent and
I don't.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
And the interesting thing.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Is that these simplified spellers, historically they were trying to
standardize an accent, because if you're going to spell words phonetically,
you do have to take an to account that people
are going to pronounce them. People have a different idea
of what phonetic version of a word is. And I
think one of the reasons the simplified spelling movement never
caught on is because they could never successfully gather all
(15:12):
these strands of regional dialects together and make a unified standard.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
There's just too much resistance.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
So do you think curse words are going to become
the thing? And the reason why I bring that up
is because a lot of late night hosts now we're saying,
why can't we cuss at night? Why can't we?
Speaker 2 (15:31):
I mean, I fucking hope so.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Classic. I mean, it's part of their words. We use
them every day. I mean, it's a just use it.
Speaker 3 (15:50):
It's a little arbitrary where we draw the line. I
mean George Carlon said it said it best, like there
are words.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
You can say on TV.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Now, I feel like you can say as you can
say crap, but you can't say shit.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Yeah, I don't get it.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
There are people paid a lot of money who make
these decisions. I think eventually it'll all get more informal
all the I think all the barriers start to come
down a little bit. But then then there'll always be
a little more of a linguistic conservative backlash. It just
snaps like a rubber band back and forth, and then
(16:26):
there might be a time where you can say fuck
the Tonight Show yep, And then twenty years after that
there'll be a new executive who comes in and says,
not only can you not say these words, but you
can't have a beard, you can't show you can't have
any scruff yep.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
It's like playing for the Yankees.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Well, I heard that we were almost given that opportunity
to use a few cuss words on the radio until
the costume malfunction with Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake, and
the dude at the FCC said, we got to clean
this mess up.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
I don't blame him, I mean, but I don't see
where language has anything.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
To do with a nipslip. Yeah, I mean, especially on
the radio.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
You could be completely naked right now, so could I,
and it wouldn't have any effect on what the audience heres.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Yeah. Yeah, I love the way that you bring in
Theodore Roosevelt a lot inside this book, because you're showing
me a side of the president that I did not know.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
I mean, the side of the president we know is
he would He had some very strong opinions about things,
and he tried to put make himself the head of
a lot of reform in conservationism, food and drug administration,
antitrust laws, corporate regulation. And I think that he saw
languages just that next frontier that he could lead the
(17:47):
charge of to improve American society. And in nineteen oh
six he became really fascinated by and stubborn about simplified spelling.
He wrote letters to well, he directed his own presidential
stenographer to recast all correspondence and communication of the Oval
(18:08):
Office in simplified spelling, and he wrote a letter to
the Simplified Spelling Board, pledging his loyalty to their cause,
and he was just hit with such backlash from the
press who just tore him apart in political cartoons and
these exaggeratedly phonetic headlines that were just designed to make
(18:29):
fun of him. And he eventually withdrew his support from
the movement a few months later, but he really did
see for a strong few months of his life, he
really saw simplified spelling as the wave of the future
for America.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Now, when you talk about simplified spelling, right away, I'm
thinking of my mother, who was brilliant at shorthand. Is
that what we're talking about here.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
That's part of it.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
So she was probably if she grew up in America,
probably familiar with Greg shorthand. Those born in England probably
used Pittman shorthand. And the whole Shorthand movement comes out
of the eighteen forties push for simplified phonetic spelling. Isaac
Pittman was the big man behind this in the eighteen forties,
(19:13):
and he started out as a simplified speller. If you
look through his early writings, you'll see he's, for one thing,
he spells his name Isaac. He starts spelling it ei
za k, just as this way to be this living,
breathing embodiment of this cause of phonetics. Eventually he saw
(19:34):
Pittman shorthand is the more practical use of simplification, because
what it would allow people to do was capture speech
or capture language at the rate of speech. It was
great for secretaries, for stenographers, and it served this great
functional workplace utility. So it became the skill set of
(19:55):
people working in you know, clerks to judges, people in
law offices, stenographers, translators. It became the skill set you needed.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
Wow, twenty minutes with you is not enough, dude. You
got to come back to this show anytime in the future.
The door is always going to be open for you.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
I'd be happy to arrow.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
Will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Okay, all right, you too,
Good morning, Gabe. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Did great? How you do an arrow?
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Absolutely fantastic. Do you look at yourself as being a
word smith because you really dive into a lot of
things here that it's like, oh my god, this guy
is like me. I like to just dig in and
find out the research that you know that goes into
just just you know, looking at the roots of a word.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
I'm a word nerd. I love language. A word smith.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
That sounds like being an expert on language, and I
think we're all experts on language. I think we're all
wordsmiths because it is the skill set you use every
time you open your mouth, every time you text a friend,
every time you pull up pen and paper, And in
terms of expertise level, we all have this first person
expertise and I don't think that so, yeah, I could
(00:48):
call myself a wordsmith just like you could.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Well. I was listening to a podcast yesterday, SmartLess with
with all those actors and things, and one of the
things that they talked about in their opening rounds was
that that every word in the dictionary, every definition in
the dictionary, is actually featured in that dictionary, and that
defines the word infinity.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
So it's a cycle that just feeds itself. It's turtles
all the way down.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Isn't that crazy?
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (01:18):
But have we become lazy spellers because I have been
quoted so many times seeing because of spell check, I
am a lazy speller. But I'm traveling in a heartbeat.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
I don't think it's laziness.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
I think when you're typing to a friend and it's
one on one and it's informal, and you take out
a few letters of the word though if you wish
them good night and you type it n ite, I
don't think that's lazy. I think that's just the natural
course that language takes and should take, because the shortest
distance between two people if you're communicating, is a simple,
(01:54):
straightforward way, and if you're trying to communicate something efficiently
and simply, you're just going to take the shortest course
to it. And you see that in spoken language too,
with the way we turn the whole phrases into short
slang words like I'll tell I'll say my friend's up
instead of saying what is up?
Speaker 2 (02:13):
How are you doing?
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Language will shorten and simplify until it finds its ideal.
Simplest form is that your way of saying that we're
going to go back to the caveman grunt. Maybe it
comes full circle like that, Maybe we go from written
language to emojis.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
To cave drawings.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Wow. The book we're talking about is enough is enough
e in uf, which I just thought that is so
creative of you to put that on there. Was it
your idea?
Speaker 3 (02:44):
Uh, I'll take credit for the title, but I won't
take credit for that spelling. That spelling comes to us
from Noah Webster back in seventeen eighty nine. He came
up with this proposal to simplify, streamline and shorten all
our words, or most of our words, and e n
uf was one of his ideas, along with spelling laugh
(03:05):
laf though thho also tongue t ung.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
They weren't all winners, but he he.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Thirty years later he created the American Dictionary. He's the
Noah Webster we know today, But if he had his
way back in seventeen eighty nine, we might all be
spelling enough e n uf.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Wow. My wife was a school teacher and they constantly
told her, let those students spell the way that they feel.
In other words, if that's the way that they you know,
can bring that word out, they're gonna They're still going
to learn more. But if you challenge them because of
their spelling, that creates a block in the head.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
That is a school of thought that when a child
is learning how to spell, that they should explore that
jungle solo. They should because if they want to establish
this lifelong connection between letters and sounds, symbols and phonemes,
that they they need to do that exploration on their
own early on. And then there's other schools of thought
(04:05):
that say, if you let them do that too long,
if you don't correct them when they spell word wrong,
they're going to grow up with this barrier between what
they know and what they feel. And then on the
other side traditional spelling and does it set them up
for failure? Does it set them up for success? There
have been studies, but I know that some schools teach
(04:26):
it one way and some still teach it the other way.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
I feel so guilty about being in the generation that
I am because I've gone through the LOL and the
BRBs and things like that, and today's newer generation would
have no idea what I'm talking about.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
And likewise, they're probably using acronyms that we don't understand exactly.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
That's the thing.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
There's some aspects of this simplifying craze that is exclusive,
that is designed to almost be this code where the
people who understand it, they're on the inside, they're in
the club, and the people on the outside there your
your millennials, your boomers, what have you. And then there's
then there's inclusive simplifications like spelling through thhru where yeah,
(05:13):
where you and me and a five year old and
a non native English speaker can come to this country
and sound it out pretty simply.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Yeah. My friend Al from Costa Rica, he always looks
at me and says, you guys have too many words
in your vocabulary. You need to shorten it down. It's
not a party, it's not a celebration, it's a fiesta.
Stick with it.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
We have too many we have too many linguistic influences
in our history. I think that's the hard why we
have so many synonyms for so many things. It's also
the heart of the reason of why we have so
many pronunciations for ough you.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Have through the tough cough boo. It goes on and
on and.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
In many ways the hodgepodge of English, the fact that
we are this historical relic that encompasses so many things
like a melting pot. A lot of people look at
that and say it's beautiful. Most people, I think, if
they're thinking about language practically, they're looking at that and saying,
come on, there's got to be a better way.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Yeah. Yeah. So do you think texting was a Beatles
moment it changed the planet?
Speaker 3 (06:24):
I think that moment when the Internet came around and
suddenly the reform movement had this vehicle for informal, bottom up,
organic simplification, I think that changed a lot.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Now it's only.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
Been twenty thirty years that we're living in this digital
age with this digital shorthand the texting, social media.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
I don't know where it goes from there.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
My guess is what we're seeing is this upswell of
bottom up democratic spelling simplification, where every year Webster's Dictionary
adds a new simplification into their pages, where it's like lol, OMG,
those are now in Websters, those are now English Dictionary.
(07:09):
Over time, maybe not in our lifetimes, but I think
the future will maybe two hundred three hundred years, will
have a much more simple version of spelling, and I'll
come back on your show in three hundred years about it.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
It's not that I'm a curmudgeon here, but I do
blame American businesses on many reasons why people are bad spellers.
You can drive down the road and see how these
businesses try to spell their name, and I understand it.
It's marketing, but it's teaching people, Oh, that must be
how you spell it.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
I think that the marketers, the advertisers, they latched onto
misspelling very early on. In the early nineteen hundreds, you
start to see this big craze for deliberate misspelling.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
I think they saw.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
It as this novelty that would catch the eyes of shoppers.
You know, like you said, you're driving down the highway,
you see a bored and misspelled that's gonna catch your eye,
That's going to hold your attention just split second longer.
And in the nineteen twenties, there was this big fad
for replacing the hard letters C and birds with a K.
(08:14):
So brands branded themselves as Kleenex with a K, Krispy Kreme,
you got your kit Kats. Linguists at the time even
had a name for this fad. They called it the
craze for k and they they blamed it on the
simplified spellers who had just been confusing people for so
many hundreds of years.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Yeah, well look at George and Gorge. I mean it
really is. It's like, oh, oh, we got a problem
with this one. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Uh, and that's that's a simple one. There are so
many more complicated. I mean, you said the word curmudgeon before.
Yeahs ask a six year old to spell that if
they haven't been the word before.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
I have to look at other length. I have to
look it up every time.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
There's a lot of letters in there.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
I don't there's a D in there. I don't think
you need in there for one thing. So many words
are so complicated in our language. Most other languages don't
have that problem.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Oh we're just getting started with Gave Henry. Please do
not move. Thanks for coming back to my conversation with
word historian Gabe Henry. My guilty pleasure word is a lot.
I like making that one word. I cannot stand it
on a page when it's two words.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
You know you do you do in the radio format.
I don't think anyone would see you see how you
spell that word.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
If you're saying it out loud.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
I think you just follow your heart.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
It's so funny you say that, because my last book,
what I did was I wrote it in the language
of the way I speak, only because Mark Twain in
his autobiography talked about that we don't need to lose
our accent through writing. So I put a lot of
periods and commas in places that would really piss off
at school teacher. But but I was doing me like
you just said.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Mark Twain was an interesting guy. I mean, he loved language,
but he never saw it as static. He never loved
the status quo. He thought language was malleable, like you said.
He wrote Uncle Berry Finn from the point of view
of a low class Southern boy who doesn't he's not
that literate, he's not well spoken, and he wrote in
(10:26):
this dialectical dialect speak, which is similar to phonetic spelling.
He used some phonetic spellings in that dialect to kind
of connote that this boy was from a low class
and Mark Twain lent his name and his support to
a lot of the simplified spelling movement. He was one
(10:46):
of the founders of the Simplified Spelling Board in nineteen
oh six, which was the moment where simplified spelling went
from this niche his niche education reform social reform movement
and turns it into this pop culture phenomenon where you
start to see it more in advertising and in newspaper
headlines and people everywhere seem to be shortening and simplifying.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
And that was Mark Twain set that off.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Wow, So do the British spell the words correctly? Or
do we spell it what came first? The chicken or
the egg? I mean, because I mean you can sit
there and you need I mean, can compare British words
with American words and they're not spelled the same.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
No, I'll say one thing first that I don't think
that there's any immutably correct way to spell. I don't
think there's any immutably incorrect way to spell. I think
that if there's only what's correct for a given time.
So Shakespeare was spelling in a way that's incorrect for us.
Now I'm pretty sure we'll be we're spelling in a
(11:48):
way that will be incorrect in the future. But when
it comes to England and America, there they started to
go separate ways in language. In the seventeen eight, seventeen nineties,
and then especially when Webster's Dictionary comes out in eighteen
twenty eight, and Webster was the first one to standardize
(12:09):
these American spellings color and honor without the U, theater
and center ending er rather than R. He took out
a lot of these letters that didn't make sense to
him consistent, and his ultimate drive initially was to simplify
the whole language. But what he ended up getting away
with was these moderate simplifications that are now part of
(12:33):
American English.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
That this sourus is something that really kind of screwed
up my head. When I was putting my second book together,
I utilized that as a tool, and I think I
became addicted to it. Do we need to set that
source aside?
Speaker 2 (12:47):
I love the source. It's a great tool. It's a
maybe people use it as a crutch, yep.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
But I say use it. I say the language. What
I love about the language is that at rainbow of synonyms,
this broad spectrum of different ways you can say things.
I love things. I love the sound of English. Now
I might not love the spelling, but I do love
the sounds. I do love the implications and connotations of
(13:15):
a word over here. I like alliteration. So yeah, I
think the sort the Sai sources, I think they're a
wonderful thing. And I've always had one side. But you know,
next to me as I'm writing, I.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Like it that you said that you like the sound
of of of the words. And I'm so with you
on that because there are many times that my wife
will wait for, you know, to turn on the TV,
and she says, wait till you get in the living room.
I say, no, I want to hear them. I want
to envision them speaking. I want to be able to
see that picture without having to look at what they're presenting.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
It.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
There's a music to it.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
I love the sound of many languages, and there there
are some languages where I don't even have to understand
what they're saying.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
I can still love the sound of it, like like
French or Italian.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
They're sonorous, their musical I like a diverse, varying form
of you know, rhythms and lilts and and just.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
Sounds it does. It can be like music to me.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
So what does a southern accent do to you? Because
down here it goes down a little bit slower than
the rest of the country.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Well, I don't know if it's quite up there with French,
but I do love the diverse accents in this country.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
I mean, I'm from Brooklyn, New York.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
I order coffee like like it offended.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Me, but but I love hearing.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
I love hearing Chicago accent of accent an accent and
I don't.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
And the interesting thing.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Is that these simplified spellers, historically they were trying to
standardize an accent, because if you're going to spell words phonetically,
you do have to take an to account that people
are going to pronounce them. People have a different idea
of what phonetic version of a word is. And I
think one of the reasons the simplified spelling movement never
caught on is because they could never successfully gather all
(15:12):
these strands of regional dialects together and make a unified standard.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
There's just too much resistance.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
So do you think curse words are going to become
the thing? And the reason why I bring that up
is because a lot of late night hosts now we're saying,
why can't we cuss at night? Why can't we?
Speaker 2 (15:31):
I mean, I fucking hope so.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Classic. I mean, it's part of their words. We use
them every day. I mean, it's a just use it.
Speaker 3 (15:50):
It's a little arbitrary where we draw the line. I
mean George Carlon said it said it best, like there
are words.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
You can say on TV.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Now, I feel like you can say as you can
say crap, but you can't say shit.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Yeah, I don't get it.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
There are people paid a lot of money who make
these decisions. I think eventually it'll all get more informal
all the I think all the barriers start to come
down a little bit. But then then there'll always be
a little more of a linguistic conservative backlash. It just
snaps like a rubber band back and forth, and then
(16:26):
there might be a time where you can say fuck
the Tonight Show yep, And then twenty years after that
there'll be a new executive who comes in and says,
not only can you not say these words, but you
can't have a beard, you can't show you can't have
any scruff yep.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
It's like playing for the Yankees.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Well, I heard that we were almost given that opportunity
to use a few cuss words on the radio until
the costume malfunction with Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake, and
the dude at the FCC said, we got to clean
this mess up.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
I don't blame him, I mean, but I don't see
where language has anything.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
To do with a nipslip. Yeah, I mean, especially on
the radio.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
You could be completely naked right now, so could I,
and it wouldn't have any effect on what the audience heres.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Yeah. Yeah, I love the way that you bring in
Theodore Roosevelt a lot inside this book, because you're showing
me a side of the president that I did not know.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
I mean, the side of the president we know is
he would He had some very strong opinions about things,
and he tried to put make himself the head of
a lot of reform in conservationism, food and drug administration,
antitrust laws, corporate regulation. And I think that he saw
languages just that next frontier that he could lead the
(17:47):
charge of to improve American society. And in nineteen oh
six he became really fascinated by and stubborn about simplified spelling.
He wrote letters to well, he directed his own presidential
stenographer to recast all correspondence and communication of the Oval
(18:08):
Office in simplified spelling, and he wrote a letter to
the Simplified Spelling Board, pledging his loyalty to their cause,
and he was just hit with such backlash from the
press who just tore him apart in political cartoons and
these exaggeratedly phonetic headlines that were just designed to make
(18:29):
fun of him. And he eventually withdrew his support from
the movement a few months later, but he really did
see for a strong few months of his life, he
really saw simplified spelling as the wave of the future
for America.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Now, when you talk about simplified spelling, right away, I'm
thinking of my mother, who was brilliant at shorthand. Is
that what we're talking about here.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
That's part of it.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
So she was probably if she grew up in America,
probably familiar with Greg shorthand. Those born in England probably
used Pittman shorthand. And the whole Shorthand movement comes out
of the eighteen forties push for simplified phonetic spelling. Isaac
Pittman was the big man behind this in the eighteen forties,
(19:13):
and he started out as a simplified speller. If you
look through his early writings, you'll see he's, for one thing,
he spells his name Isaac. He starts spelling it ei
za k, just as this way to be this living,
breathing embodiment of this cause of phonetics. Eventually he saw
(19:34):
Pittman shorthand is the more practical use of simplification, because
what it would allow people to do was capture speech
or capture language at the rate of speech. It was
great for secretaries, for stenographers, and it served this great
functional workplace utility. So it became the skill set of
(19:55):
people working in you know, clerks to judges, people in
law offices, stenographers, translators. It became the skill set you needed.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
Wow, twenty minutes with you is not enough, dude. You
got to come back to this show anytime in the future.
The door is always going to be open for you.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
I'd be happy to arrow.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
Will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Okay, all right, you too,
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