Enough Is Enuf
Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Apr 15, 2025
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"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.
