Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell

“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.)