Enough is Enuf

Carrie and Megan talk with Gabe Henry about his new book, Enough is enuf: Our failed attempts to make English eezier to spell.

• Puerto Rico and English as an Official Language

Chapters

• 14:53 Interview with Gabe

Transcript

Megan Figueroa: Hi, and welcome to the Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination.

Carrie Gillon: I'm Carrie Gillon. 

Megan: And I'm Megan Figueroa. Carrie, we had our first 100 degree day yesterday and it beat records. 

Carrie: Oh, no. 

Megan: Apparently the average first day that we get 100 degrees here is May 18th. Isn't that horrifying?

Carrie: Okay. And what's the record before yesterday? 

Megan: It was April 19th in 1989.

Carrie: So that's still a lot. It's still weak, right?

Megan: I know. I was ready for it because I saw it in the 10-day forecast.

Carrie: You're ready for it, but you're not ready for it.

Megan: I was going to say I was mentally ready for it, but then my body was like, nope. 

Carrie: No. I mean, I do feel like 100 is still tolerable in the desert. 

Megan: It is. 

Carrie: Versus 110 where my brain just stops functioning altogether. You can handle it, but it's so early that I think my brain would also be like and my body nope. 

Megan: No, it's so early. You're like, what does that mean for the rest of the summer?

Carrie: I know, that's where my brain would be going to. Meanwhile today it's quite lovely here in Vancouver. It's very sunny and…

Megan: Oh, lovely.

Carrie: … I'm definitely looking forward to going outside and enjoying the spring day. 

Megan: Spring day. We kind of went over spring and we're in summer.

Carrie: There's not really spring. There's not really spring there. 

Megan: Things start springing up.

Carrie: Yes.

Megan: The flowers and such, the allergens.

Carrie: Yes, there's sort of like a light winter. 

Megan: A light winter. Yes.

Carrie: And then like border seasons on either side and then summer. Anyways, so once again, 1 of our patrons who always sends us stuff and please we encourage everybody to send us stuff, sent us a bunch and the 1 we decided to talk about today is from NBC News, Puerto Ricans worry over Trump order designating English as US official language. 

Megan: It's perfect because I've been thinking about this actually. I've been thinking about the fallout of the official language thing because I knew there was going to be some, if not a ton. 

Carrie: It's hard because there's been so much other stuff that's happened in the meantime, right? Like all the tariffs off and on and off again. I have lots of thoughts about that but anyway...

Megan: I bet you do.

Carrie: Trying to buy Greenland for $10,000 a person, blah, blah, blah. There's just all this stuff going on. So I had not forgotten exactly, but this is way down on the list of things that I've been thinking about recently, so I'm glad to be reminded. 

Megan: Yes. 

Carrie: So the sub-headline is, the president's upcoming executive order reignites a debate over what changes could take place in the Spanish-speaking US territory, especially if Puerto Rico becomes a state.

Megan: So was this before he signed it?

Carrie: Yeah, it's from February 28th. So, I don't know, being a territory, are you more protected from this executive order?

Megan: I don't know. And protected is an interesting way to think about it too. Especially since we're so terrible at Puerto Rico. 

Carrie: Yes, and other territories. Speaking of Puerto Rico, I can't remember if we talked about it on the show or not, but I don't think we did. But there was that woman married to a Trump supporter from Peru, and they went on their honeymoon or something to Puerto Rico. At the airport they were stopped and she was detained. 

Megan: Oh, my God. In Puerto Rico?

Carrie: Yeah. 

Megan: Oh no. 

Carrie: And some of the headlines, or not headlines, sorry, some of the ways that the media was talking about it was as they went back to the United States. It's like, what? No. Back to the mainland, sure. Back to the United States, no. That actually really scared me. There's been so many of these cases that have been really scary, but this one really got to me because the reason why they detained her is because she had been out of status. Just a minor thing, not a criminal or anything. Anyway, there's been many such cases. 

Megan: And there will be more, it sounds like.

Carrie: What's that guy's name? I can't remember his name. The Palestinian? Mahmoud Khalil, has been ordered to be deported. 

Megan: Right.

Carrie: For nothing. 

Megan: For nothing. For protected speech. 

Carrie: It's not protected speech anymore. 

Megan: Nope. Not under Marco Rubio and Donald Trump.

Carrie: And the Supreme Court, unless they stop it. 

Megan: Yeah. 

Carrie: I knew they were lying. Calling out hypocrisy feels very empty at this point. But it's still horrifying just how much, how blatantly they've been lying about the First Amendment.

Megan: Oh, yeah.

Carrie: Anyway, returning to our topic.

Megan: It's all interconnected. 

Carrie: Okay, so apparently, I don't remember if this actually happened, the order rescinded the mandate requiring agencies and recipients of federal funding to provide language assistance to non-English speakers. I think that's true.

Megan: That's true. 

Carrie: But the agencies are supposedly allowed to keep their current policies and provide documents if they want, and they can't be required to. 

Megan: Oh my God. Okay.

Carrie: Which is interesting. I would have thought they would just not be allowed to. 

Megan: Right. Maybe that makes it more palatable.

Carrie: Yes. They're like, see, we're not all evil. Really, a little bit evil. 

Megan: Exactly.

Carrie: Did you know that Spanish and English are official languages in Puerto Rico?

Megan: No, I did not know that. All right, so how long has that been the case?

Carrie: I don't know. That's a good question. Let's see. In 1902, by the colonial government and then English was removed as an official language in 1991. And then it was brought back as a second official language in 1993 and has remained co-official since. So sort of since 1902.

Megan: Interesting. 

Carrie: With a minor blip in the 90s. Spanish and English are the official languages of Puerto Rico, but the main language is still Spanish. In schools, it's Spanish. Apparently, only a quarter of Puerto Ricans living on the island are fluent in English. 

Megan: I knew that. Which is why I was kind of surprised that English was one of the co-official languages.

Carrie: Well, it makes sense if you're a part of an English speaking country, right?

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: Which they are. I think the reason why they briefly kicked English off for 2 years is just as a response to the English only movement. But then it just didn't make sense not to have English as well. How do you interface with the rest of the country? Okay, this is an interesting quote. So this is from Representative Pablo José Hernández, who is a non-voting member of Congress, which my brain just refuses to accept that that's a thing.

Megan: Right. I know.

Carrie: But anyways, it is what it is. He said the order, "Reflects a vision of American identity that conflicts with our Puerto Rican identity” and “There will be no statehood without assimilation and Puerto Ricans will never surrender our identity. For those of us who seek a union with the US without assimilation, there's only 1 alternative, maintaining and strengthening the current Commonwealth relationship.” Especially now with this order, there's no way to maintain the Spanish identity, Spanish-speaking identity, because they'll be forced to switch to English completely. So statehood would be detrimental to the identity of Puerto Ricans, according to this representative."

Megan: I agree. That's a good quote. 

Carrie: I've always thought that Puerto Ricans should have that decision, but they should also be allowed to leave. 

Megan: Yes.

Carrie: They should be allowed to leave, they should be allowed to become a state, they should be allowed to stay as they are. That should be their choice. 

Megan: Right. And is it, I don't know if the votes are ever close to becoming a state or not, if they’re often… 

Carrie: Has it ever been voted on? 

Megan: I don't know, actually.

Carrie: I don't think so. I could be wrong, but my impression is there's lots of chatter about it, but there's never been any movement.

Megan: And it would be the Congress, right? It wouldn't be the choice of Puerto Ricans.

Carrie: I think what would have to happen is there would have to be some sort of polling at least. They could just say, or state now, I guess, but it would be weird to waste your political capital on that if Puerto Ricans didn't want it.

Megan: I wonder if right now there's widespread thought that they don't want it because of something like this. 

Carrie: I'm ashamed to say I have no idea because I have been so fixated on everything outside of the US. 

Megan: Well, you mean like all the fallout?

Carrie: All the tariffs, all the saber rattling, all the realignments. Who can Canada actually trust these days? It's not the UK, I can tell you that. 

Megan: There's a lot of things going on right now.

Carrie: Once again, just like with the first Trump administration, although at least there were some guardrails in place the first time around. 

Megan: Absolutely. The guardrails are off and that he did sign the Executive Order and so English is the official language. I just got to imagine that people in Puerto Rico probably don't want to become a state right now.

Carrie: Probably not. It's probably weakened whatever was there in the first place, which I didn't feel like it was very strong. Again, I'm total outsider and I didn't investigate it that closely but the impression I got was that it was not a very strong drive within Puerto Rico to become a state. 

Megan: Right. 

Carrie: Because they can maintain some sort of independence as they are or have been able to anyway.

Megan: I wonder what the diaspora thinks. I wonder what AOC thinks. 

Carrie: That's a good question. I think the diaspora is probably more mixed. I'm going to guess. But again, I don't know for sure.

Megan: Just think about the things that this affects. I had a feeling that the administration would do something like this when it came to language, but it's just like who you vote for matters. 

Carrie: Well, and I wonder too, certain states have other official languages. 

Megan: That's true. 

Carrie: We talked about Alaska, right? So at least there's some protection for some indigenous languages in Alaska. But how much protection is there? And what about Arizona, which doesn't? I don't think. And at least not in the indigenous languages. So there's Navajo instruction, actually also in New Mexico and Arizona. Are kids going to be allowed to continue in those schools…

Megan: That's a good question. 

Carrie: … or are they going to have to be forced to switch to English again? 

Megan: Again. That's awful. After so much effort gets put into getting Navajo instruction or indigenous instruction be taken away. 

Carrie: It's already such a precarious state, right? I don't know. I don't know if this is going to affect it. I just know that, for example, No Child Left Behind did affect or make it harder for states to say actually, yes, you can teach whichever indigenous language. I know that in Hawaii they had to really fight hard to keep Hawaiian in the schools. But they did. Education policy really matters and I don't actually know what the fact is. I should have looked this up, but we just decided to talk about this right now, so. 

Megan: That's okay. People can let us know if they have any information on this kind of stuff too that we talk about. 

Carrie: Absolutely. So it's a frustrating time for plenty of reasons.

Megan: Very frustrating. 

Carrie: I guess the other thing that's also occupying my time in terms of thought, my brain space in terms of language is all the AI shit.

Megan: Absolutely. 

Carrie: It’s just so toxic and I really feel like I'm becoming a little bit more insane every day. How many humans are agreeing with me that this is a bad path we're going down, it seems like tiny. 

Megan: Is tiny. It is tiny.

Carrie: Everyone is just like, oh yeah, I just asked ChatGPT this question and it gave me this answer. No questioning as to whether that was actually accurate information that ChatGPT gave them.

Megan: Right.

Carrie: I'm just like, okay, so maybe you'll end up in LA not knowing where to go, but sure. Just let the computer that knows nothing tell you what to do.

Megan: Right. It is a shocking amount of people who are willing to accept what a computer tells them. 

Carrie: I cannot believe it. Why are they trusting this thing? I don't get it. 

Megan: I have no idea. Because it's a newfangled thing.

Carrie: Well, I guess mostly new tech for the most part has been generally helpful, right? Word processing, the internet has obviously some downsides, but has a lot of good upsides too, right, that are very obvious. And so there's been just a lot of things that are useful. And then so this next thing must be useful too. Look at how much hype there is around it. It must be good. 

Megan: Right. 

Carrie: I don't know. Just losing my mind. Slowly my brain is just seeping out of my ears. 

Megan: I can see that. 

Carrie: Anyway, so today's episode is very interesting.

Megan: We talk about the spelling movement reform.

Carrie: Spelling! 

Megan: Very fun. Very interesting. Enjoy! 

Carrie: Enjoy

Megan: All right, so we are so excited today to have Gabe Henry, who is the author of 3 books, including the poetry anthology, Eating Salad Drunk, a humor collaboration with Jerry Seinfeld, Bob Odenkirk, Mike Birbiglia, Margaret Cho, and other titans of comedy. Eating Salad Drunk was featured in the New Yorker in February, 2022 and ranked 1 of Vulture's best comedy books of 2022. Henry's work has been published in New York Magazine, The Weekly Humorous, The New Yorker, Light Poetry Magazine, and the Motion Picture Association Magazine, The Credits. He has spent more than a decade exploring this strange and forgotten history of simplified spelling, which by his own admission has only made him a worse speller. We are so excited today to have him to talk about his new book, Enough Is Enough, Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell. Thank you so much for being here with us. 

Carrie: Thank you.

Gabe Henry: Thanks for having me, guys. 

Carrie: Of course.

Megan: And congratulations on this book. It is such a fun ride. It's such an interesting … It's like what a great history lesson disguised as a fun, I don't know. 

Gabe: I think that's the sweet spot I've always been looking for. Try to teach history without making it sound dull. Try to teach it so it doesn't sound like high school. 

Carrie: But this would be a great book to assign for high school.

Megan: I was going to say this would be a great book to assign actually. So we always start with the same question. Why did you want to write this book and why now?

Gabe: Well, I first learned about the subject back in college. I remember my first reaction to it was probably what most people's reaction is, which is, this subject is absolutely silly and ridiculous and I can't believe that it's real. And just the idea that people were walking around in revolutionary times with their powdered wigs spelling laugh, L-A-F and though T-H-O, like some modern Gen Z teenager with a smartphone. It just seems so unbelievable to me. And then it wasn't until many years later that as I started looking more into the movement and reading about it and reading the articles and reading the archives and the letters and the newspapers that I realized that there's much more to this movement than I had thought. It's way more complex. It's way more rich and it attracted a really extraordinary people, characters. And some of these characters, as you know, you've read it, they're brilliant. Some of them are brilliant and some are just absolutely completely out of their minds. 

Carrie: Yes. 

Megan: You get a whole range, don't you? 

Gabe: You really do. But they all shared this belief that they could change the world, at least in some small way, by changing the way we spell. So I wanted to bring this movement and these characters to life and to also explore how even these tiny efforts to change the world sometimes have these really surprising ripple effects throughout history. 

Megan: Absolutely. 

Gabe: And in terms of the relevance to today, well, there's a lot it says about who polices language. Does language belong to the people? Does it belong to the institutions? Does it belong to the authorities from on high, from above and what power do those elite institutions have over what is just a democratized way of communicating? So, I think there was a lot of friction during this movement between what the people use naturally, organically, how they speak, how they write, versus what a rich authority wants them to spell like. And I think that 1 of the main reasons that the simplified spelling movement never really succeeded, at least in an official formalized way, is because there was this constant tension between the people on top and the rest of us at the bottom.

So as rational, and reasonable, as simplified spelling might seem to those people at the top who are more scientifically minded about it and want to break language down into bullet pointed units that they could understand clearly, that ultimately language evolves from the bottom and has to evolve from the bottom because that's what's being used every day. 

Carrie: Absolutely. And I think it also intersects with the English only thing that just happened. It's like going out to the US…

Megan: It is.

Carrie: … when I was reading your book, you mentioned that there was a period of time right after the Revolution when maybe English was not going to be the preferred language, at least from the elites point of view. That didn't happen for obvious reasons, but it just reminded me. This has lots of resonance with today. 

Gabe: You mentioned this period right after the American Revolution. 1 of the most fascinating parts of the book for me that I learned was after the revolution, it was time to build a culture. It was time to build a new country and there were a lot of discussions about how to distinguish us from England, our oppressor. We speak English. We are English in every way, except we don't belong to England anymore. So how are we going to create a new American culture? And 1 of the questions was, should we have a new language?

There were some people among the early founders who suggested we switch to French. And that obviously didn't work. For obvious reasons you can't just point your finger and decree that everyone speaks a different language tomorrow. There was some talk about making Hebrew the national language of America to kind of self-identify as a chosen people. America is on, we're the light of the world, the future, and obviously that didn't work either. 

And then Noah Webster came along. He eventually would create Webster's dictionary. And he suggested we don't need to have an entirely different language. We could just have a different spelling. We’ll have an American spelling and this would be based on the English language, but totally phoneticized. No silent letters, like a fully consistent set of letters that are used in a consistent way. For instance, like your name, Carrie, he would probably look at that and say, well, there's two R's. Do we need both? There's an E at the end. We don't really need that. And that letter C, I mean, we could change that to a K. And then he would probably spell it K-A-R-I. And this was his version of an American identity. 

Carrie: So what is simplified spelling or simplified spelling system? 

Gabe: Well, the movement was an effort over hundreds of years, kind of an underground movement to shorten and streamline English spelling by removing silent letters and phoneticizing words. So you get words like love spelled L-U-V, through spelled T-H-R-U, tongue T-U-N-G, and then you have some real weird proposals like education spelled let me give this a try E-J-U-K-A-Y-S-H-U-N.

Carrie: You did it I think.

Gabe: Thank you. Well, luckily it's not an objective phonetic and as silly as this probably sounds to your listeners, to any listeners, very few people have heard about this movement and as silly as the visuals and the aesthetics are of it, it was proposed in almost every decade for the past 300 years by very serious people who really looked at our language and said, this is a chaotic language. It's not phonetic. It requires many more years for our children to learn. It requires many more years for immigrants to learn. If you see the letter combination O-U-G-H, you could pronounce that about 8 different ways and there's no way to know which way unless you've almost photographically memorized it. 

So they looked at this and then they compared it to romance languages and they compared it to Spanish and German and Arabic and Korean and Russian, which are very phonetic languages in which it's relatively easy to learn how to spell. Not necessarily how to speak, but how to spell. And when you see 1 letter in a context, it's more than likely going to have the same sound in another context. 

So they came up with simplified spelling and dozens and maybe hundreds of proposals, some of them absolutely out of this world, some of them involving numbers in place of vowels, some of them involving new symbols entirely. Benjamin Franklin tried to get rid of 6 letters and add 6 new letters. It looks pretty chaotic. 

Megan: It does.

Gabe: To them, it was as sensible as the periodic table or something. It was as sensible as science. 

Megan: And writing a book is really hard, but you had to do a lot of work with all of these different alphabet systems. Was that difficult? 

Gabe: It was very difficult. And you know who hated it the most was our typesetter. 

Carrie: I was going to say typesetter. 

Gabe: We had to create, go into some Photoshop type things and create characters from scratch because a lot of the characters that were used in these old texts, which we have digital copies of now, those fonts, those letters don't exist. They're symbols that were drawn and then set in like a metal foundry and they don't exist in Microsoft Word. So we had to go and create them. And then the other person that probably hated me a lot was our copy editor.

Carrie: Oh yeah. 

Gabe: Because every page is full of typos, but are they deliberate? Did I accidentally misspell a word or did I deliberately misspell it? I had to confirm on this. It was probably not a job that she ever thought she'd be doing.

Carrie: No kidding. 

Gabe: Generally, when there's a typo, it's pretty universally known that oh, that word is spelled wrong.

Carrie: Although if you deal with multiple spelling systems, like I have to. So I do some copy editing on the side and I have to determine based on what's happening, is this US English or UK English and just go with that and it's a little tricky. 

Gabe: Carrie, are you in Canada?

Carrie: I am. Yes, I'm in Vancouver. 

Gabe: Okay. So I assume you use UK spellings. 

Carrie: No, Canadian spelling system is kind of halfway between the 2. So we spell tire the American way, color, usually the British way and so on. 

Gabe: Wow, you're really stuck between.

Megan: And favorite, right? You favorite with a U. 

Carrie: Yeah, I write favorite with U. 

Gabe: And how do you spell plow? 

Carrie: The American way. But actually, I feel like both are okay for me. I don't know which one is technically the more correct way, but yeah. 

Gabe: Well, those American spellings that we have are basically the only remnants of the simplified spelling movement. They come from Noah Webster, who, like I said, proposed a very radical new form of spelling. It was rejected and he withdrew it but 20 years later, when he's putting together Webster's dictionary, he selectively incorporates a lot of these older, more moderate simplified spellings into his new text. And those are words like color and honor without the U, plow and draft spelled in the more phonetic American way. And there's probably a few dozen of those. 

Carrie: And also the R-E-E-R. 

Gabe: Yes. Centre.

Carrie: Canadians generally spell it the British slash French way.

Gabe: Interesting. Oh.

Carrie: We're a mess. We're so sandwiched between these 2 cultures. We sound more American, obviously but…

Gabe: You're bilingual. You’re a bilingual country and a bispelling country. 

Carrie: Yes. Maybe even tribe, right. Because some people have way more British, some people have way more American and then … anyway. So why have people over the centuries, every decade or so, attempted to simplify English spelling and why do they usually fail? 

Gabe: Well, there are always many different reasons. The interesting thing about simplified spelling is that whatever belief or mindset you have approaching it, you kind of see it reflected back at you. It almost acts as this mirror, almost like a Rorschach quality where if you're scientifically minded, you're going to look at it and see it as for it. You'd see it for its scientific logic. It's very preciseness and you will just see it almost mathematically. Now, if you approach it from more of a socially progressive mindset, you'll see it as something that will accelerate literacy because the easier it is to learn how to spell, the easier it is for people to become literate in this country and literacy is a good thing universally. That's how they'll see it. And they'll see it as something that democratizes language, that invites new people into our language and doesn't create this linguistic barrier for entry into society. 

And then if you come at it from let's say a capitalistic perspective, an industrial perspective, which a lot of people did in the early 1900s, they saw it for its ability to increase efficiency in the workforce, simplified spelling because it utilizes fewer letters. It in theory saves time. It saves money. It saves ink. It saves paper. And for business-minded men who let's say run publishing companies or newspapers, they saw it as this almost industrial form of writing. And that was in the 1900s, Andrew Carnegie, he was attracted to simplified spelling because he was a steel tycoon and he was probably the richest man in the world at the time. And he wasn't necessarily trying to democratize language. He was a big philanthropic man and charitable, but I think that he saw it more as we can boost an American identity around this new, faster, more efficient frontier of language. 

Megan: And these different reasons.

Carrie: So the Elon Musk of this time, maybe slightly less evil though. 

Gabe: It's interesting to see the analogous honchos to those times. The people now who are in charge of our government, it might be the kind of person very much against spelling reform or very much for it. 

Carrie: Yes.

Gabe: It really depends what kind of day you catch them on. But it is almost the idea that you're a powerful person and you want to change the way other people behave, a lot of that goes into language reform.

Megan: The reasons that you stated, they’ so vary. That's how you can get people like Andrew Carnegie and bring them young to be in the same corner on this which was the most surprising person I think for me in the book. I don't know about you Carrie or you Gabe, who was the most surprising for you in all this? 

Gabe: There's a lot of surprising names, Mark Twain, H.G. Wells. H.G. Wells, Melvil Dewey, creator of the Dewey Decimal System. 

Carrie: That doesn't seem as surprising to me, to categorize it. 

Gabe: That's true. You can see a little OCD in some of these people. 

Carrie: Yes. 

Gabe: Like I need to understand everything. I need to fit into a textbook and not have unpredictability. I want to be able to find it when I need it. And a lot of people who end up in lexicography and making dictionaries in general seem to be pretty obsessive compulsive people, people like Samuel Johnson and Webster. 

Carrie: Oh man, when Samuel Johnson came into the picture, which of course I knew he would, but I was reminded of Blackadder. Did you ever watch that TV show? 

Gabe: I didn't. No.

Carrie: Well, Samuel Johnson makes an appearance in one season of that show. Anyway. 

Gabe: I know it. I absolutely know. Is this, forgive my…

Carrie: Rowan Atkinson.

Gabe: It's Rowan Atkinson, Mr. Bean. 

Carrie: Mr. Bean, yes. 

Gabe: Mr. Bean. I was going to apologize for only knowing him for the 1 role, but I do, I have seen that clip in Blackadder. I have seen that clip. It's wonderful. You should direct your listeners to it. 

Carrie: I will.

Gabe: It's on YouTube. If books had the ability to have video, we would have that. 

Carrie: Exactly. 

Megan: So did you see the clip because you were doing research for this book? 

Gabe: Yes. Side note just for myself going in there, just filing it away. I've been presenting this book and in some public forum and I might be showing that clip at the next one. 

Carrie: You should. You absolutely should. It's good.

Megan: Definitely. 

Carrie: It's solid. 

Megan: I'll have to watch after this interview. What is your favorite failed attempt to simplify English spelling? 

Gabe: Well. In the 1840s, there were 2 people, completely separate, who both tried to take out letters of the alphabet and replace them with numbers. So there was this man August Tebodin, and I think it was 1842, he publishes this proposal to replace all vowels with numbers, and he draws up this 3 by 3 grid numbered 1 through 9, and to each number he assigns a corresponding vowel sound. So a nuanced vowel sound. So not just A-E-I-O-U, but all the nuance in betweens. And so the number 1 would correspond to the letter U as in view. 

So if you were to write the word view in his system, you'd spell it V1 and then number 9 would be an A and so on and so forth. And he translated texts. He translated biblical passages into this new spelling and looking at it, it really looks like some really hyperactive middle school kid wrote it because it's just numbers or it looks like Prince wrote it on 1 of his albums. And then a couple years after him, just by coincidence another man named Bartłomiej Beniowski. He came up with a similar system, but his version was to replace all letters with numbers.

Carrie: Wow!

Gabe: So what you would do in his system is first you would take a word like paper for instance and you would reduce it to its dominant consonants. So paper would become PPR. And then you would take those letters and you'd bring them over to another grid, another number grid, and each number on the grid would have corresponding letters like a telephone keypad and you'd find PPR corresponds to the numbers 994, and that's how you'd spell it. So in his theory, this was probably the simplest, most concise way that you could relay information. It's almost Morse code but of course, no one's going to learn to say it just never caught on because you look at it and it's unintelligible because first of all, there's 2 stages of simplification. It's not just the numbers. It's also you're taking out letters. But he really believed that you could.

1 of his other things that he's famous for, this guy, Beniowski, is for creating a mnemonic number memorization system. And for the next 150 years, even to today, a lot of people use it when they enter world memory competitions, which are a thing. There's something about numbers that he thought, if I could convert all language to numbers, I could in theory memorize a whole book. 

Carrie: That is not how my brain works. 

Megan: My brain went... 

Carrie: And also it’s like taking a Semitic writing system sort of, right, where you have like the root consonants but then also making it more complicated by putting the numbers. How do you even get there? 

Gabe: Well, he had a great name for his system. He called it the anti absurd alphabet, which is the ultimate, and anyone who use this alphabet, he referred to them as anti absurdists and he urged everyone to spell anti absurdly. 

Carrie: It's like the rationalists who totally are completely irrational at this point. 

Gabe: It's a horseshoe, maybe it comes back around. It is possible to be so rational about something that it's inhumane. That it's just like it can make so much sense that it just doesn't make practical sense. 

Megan: There were some more practical attempts at this, I thought, when Carol Chomsky came up. Was it creative spelling or I don’t know what it was called.

Gabe: There were some names for it. Inventive spelling, I think, was the term used. Other people have called it creative spelling and it's a theory of childhood learning. And again, Carol Chomsky, she was a linguist, 1970s-ish. Her husband Noam Chomsky is probably the more famous of the Chomsky duo. But she came up with this theory of childhood learning called inventive spelling, which was the idea that you should let a child spell in their own creative, phonetic ways without correction. So if you were to spell, let's say, the word night as N-I-T, and you were 4 years old, no one should correct you because you are exploring your own phonetic avenues. You're working that muscle. You're early in your development. So instead of a parent stepping in to correct you, you should let the child make their own mistakes. 

In theory, this works, but it also led to, I mean, at what point in the child's learning do you stop this? And I think that inventive spelling continued on into the seventies and eighties with varying degrees of success where people, if they weren't corrected early, it's almost like they needed the correction because there are right and wrong ways in traditional English spelling to spell. And unfortunately in the English language, there's a big stigma around surrounding core spelling. People look down upon you, children make fun of you. If you send a misspelled tweet, the whole world jumps on you. And I think that if we're going to continue to use traditional spelling, child probably should be taught early on that you spell though, T-H-O-U-G-H and not T-H-O, then those misspellings will stick for longer into their adulthood. 

And if literacy is the ideal, then you want that kid learning the right way as early as possible. But again, this only really applies if we're sticking with traditional English spelling, if we're really going to hold people to the bar, to the standard of spelling that was put into concrete 400 years ago and hasn't really evolved since. 

Megan: And like you said, it's harder to unlearn something. So if they're going to be kind of taught that it's okay to have these spellings, it's going to be hard to unlearn that. It does seem to be a point where the children do need to know, but maybe when they're 4, it's okay. I don't know. I'd really honestly don't know. 

Carrie: It's okay. I think it was inspired, like you said, by her husband because in language acquisition, it's okay to not fix the errors because kids will fix the errors on their own spoken, when it's spoken language. 

Megan: It’s a totally different thing. 

Carrie: But when it's something like writing, it's artificial. 

Megan: Totally different thing.

Carrie: It's interesting though. So we talked a little bit about this, but maybe you can expand. So what is the connection between spelling conventions and nation building, at least for the United States? 

Gabe: Well, language is always an identifier. Language is rooted in tradition and identity. And when you are among the first generation of people in a new country, like let's say the early United States, you have to build a culture that's all your own. You have to build myths that are your own. You have to build larger than life figures. You have to have your version of, well, you have your constitution, but you really have to have your version of a Bible, something that people look to and say, this is us, this is America, this is who I am. And I think that language does a number of things. It ties a people together in solidarity because they're using that shared language and it also kind of keeps people out. 

And this was one of the reasons that Brigham Young wanted to use simplified spelling in his early Deseret community, the early Mormon community. Is that the Mormons had been chased around the country for more than a decade and they were always on edge about being invaded or being prosecuted or persecuted. And he saw simplified spelling, his version of it, which utilized brand new letters, 38 letters. He saw it as a way to keep things secret within the Deseret community, so information couldn't get out. It built solidarity around a shared identity and a shared language and it was a way that people linguistically congregated. It was something that they could all do together and that no one else in the world could do. 

He was also, I think any new nation is also always wary of war because they're so insecure about their new station in the world that they think someone's going to come and take it. The early US founders felt that just as much as Brigham Young did. And they saw language as a thing that kept their secrets safe, kept people outside and kept themselves in. 

Carrie: How has simplified spelling been used over the years as a tool for social change, like abolition? 

Gabe: Well, simplified spelling in the 1800s, the simplified spellers tended to overlap with a lot of other countercultural movements in the 1800s. So let's say you were a spelling reformer in 1850, there was a strong likelihood you would also be involved in the movement for temperance, for vegetarianism, mysticism, homeopathy, all these movements on the outskirts, and above all, abolition. A lot of abolitionists saw simplified spelling as a tool to accelerate literacy among newly freed slaves. And in the years after the Civil War, many simplified spellers and even some abolitionists spent time traveling through freed black communities in the South teaching simplified spelling. And this was their way to bring people into the society. It was the pathway to empowerment, to civic participation because obviously during reconstruction there were literacy laws. You couldn't vote unless you were literate and it was a way to spread democracy and equality in this post slavery society.

And then I think that the idea that it's a tool for reform, a tool for literacy, it evens the playing field, is a big undercurrent of a lot of this movement and a lot of this book. And if you really hold literacy to be a profound moral imperative for an informed country, informed people, then you should make that barrier to inclusion as small and as easy as possible. You can build any kind of exclusive policies around a literacy barrier if you want that barrier to remain. So in that post-slavery, post-emancipation, southern society, people were coming out of slavery full adults with no knowledge of letters, no knowledge of spelling, and had no access to what society could offer and had nothing to give back to society. Had no way to read signs on the road, had no way to write letters, had no way to communicate really.

It was probably the peak of the reformist ideal for these spelling reformers, for the progressive minded ones, that we want a free, knowledgeable, informed, literate nation and we are incorporating a brand new, newly liberated million people into our society and we want them to be able to participate. 

Megan: And similarly, you talk about suffrage, right? 

Gabe: Suffrage and shorthand came together around the same time, right before the Civil War. So shorthand, it's a version of simplified spelling, but it doesn't use the traditional letters we have. It utilizes dots and lines and swoops. It was created by Isaac Pitman in the 1840s and it was utilized mostly by men at first; secretaries, stenographers. But as the 1860s came along and the Civil War took a lot of those men out of their roles, out of their jobs, these positions, stenography and secretarial positions became dominated by women and shorthand became an almost exclusively female skill. And it was aided by all these new shorthand schools, women shorthand schools that popped up in America, in England, in Scotland. And these schools naturally became this kind of meeting place for suffragists. And these groups started to commingle and suffragists learned the art of shorthand Shorthanders, sonographers, they joined the feminist fight and eventually these groups kind of became one in a lot of areas. 

A lot of people looked at shorthand as something that is almost like a symbol of female empowerment, because it allowed women to do their jobs more efficiently, quicker rate, quicker speed. And people likened it at the time to the bloomer dress. What the bloomer did for clothing, lifting the restrictions and the constraint of tight fitting clothing and corsets. The same thing happened with shorthand, which is that it lifted the orthographic cuffs of the woman in the workforce. It allowed them to do their job more freely. The bloomer dress has often been referred to as the freedom dress and I think it would probably be appropriate to call shorthand freedom spelling. 

Megan: I like that. 

Carrie: Do stenographers still use the Pitman shorthand?

Gabe: Shorthand has gone through a lot of transformation. There's someone else who created a shorthand that became most popular in America. Pitman became the most popular in England. And I think the shorthand that's used today is probably kind of a descendant, an evolved descendant. It’d be a good question. I don't know if people are still learning Pitman shorthand today. And one of the reasons is probably because courtroom stenographers do all their typing on their little keyboards, stenography keyboards. So it's very rare that people are doing it freehand anymore. 

But the people like my grandmother who grew up in America, she learned this other form of shorthand. And a lot of our grandmothers my age and who were in America in the first half of the century were kind of taught. It was kind of just part of their schooling in their college years to learn it. 

Carrie: The only connection that I have to Pitman is very indirectly, but it was sort of the basis of the syllabics used for Inuit and Cree and those languages. 

Gabe: That's so interesting. 

Carrie: Yeah, right? That's really cool. 

Gabe: I did not know that.

Carrie: So for all the good reasons that one would want to reform spelling, to make it more democratic, to make it easier to learn, children don't spend so much time, et cetera, et cetera, what hope is there for spelling reform in English? 

Gabe: Well, I don't think any movement that comes from above, any movement that comes from the top down really can work on a large scale. Now there have been other spelling reforms in other countries on very moderate scales. So in the past hundred years, Turkish, Greek, Portuguese, they've had moderate spelling reforms. It's nothing like what these people have tried in the English language. And one of the reasons is because no other language in the world has as complicated of an orthography as we do. The hope is that if you're alive in 300 years, I think our language will be a lot simpler. Our spelling, rather. Shakespeare was spelling in a way that's incorrect for us now. And I think we're spelling in a way that might be incorrect in 300 years, maybe in some small ways. 

Texting is pushing a lot of that forward because that is a kind of simplified spelling that comes from the bottom up and primarily young people up and these are the people who put their stamp on the culture very quickly once they reach adulthood. So I think that language will continue to distill and I think spoken language does that. We can see that all the time. If I saw you on the street, I might say, “Hey, Megan, stop.” Instead of, “Hey, how are you?” You’re shortening it to 1 syllable and that's the way spelling does but on a longer arc. And I think that Webster's dictionary now has OMG and LOL in it and a lot of other digital simplifications. And I'd be surprised if in 200, 300 years, if a lot of our texting digital shorthand simplifications are not part of the actual standard language. 

Carrie: Webster to me seems to be the only top down simplification and it wasn't everything, right? Like you say, he didn't keep everything. Was it 300 words or was that another? 

Gabe: That was something else. I would probably estimate it might've been in the low hundreds. It seems top down, but the thing is like he was not really respected by his peers... 

Carrie: That's true. 

Gabe: … for a lot of his life, really until 1828, when his dictionary came out. He was the target of a lot of ridicule and he was a very solitary man, OCD and very didn't like public facing things, at least for a lot of those years he was writing this book. So when it did come out, it in a way was bottom up because he was not an elite person. Now Webster's dictionary now is the authority in American English, just like Oxford is in British English. So I think that the only reason it worked is because he didn't make his simplifications part of the language by decree. He did it by suggestion. He said, “Hey, I'm to give you the most expansive, thorough dictionary of the American language that anyone has ever seen. It's going to weigh more than a toddler and this is it. And this reference manual will just be in everybody's home for the next hundred years.” And that's how our Americanized spellings got into the world. Not because some politician decided so. 

Carrie: Okay. Fair enough. 

Megan: Because politicians did try. 

Gabe: Many politicians tried. Theodore Roosevelt was probably the highest, most powerful person to ever try. Even he got voted down by Congress. 

Megan: He got laughed off the stage a little bit. Before we let you go, it's the 100th year anniversary of the Scripps Spelling Bee, right? At least that's what I learned recently from reading the PR on your book and I thought that was really interesting. Will you tell us a little bit about how simplified spelling infiltrated the National Spelling Bee?

Gabe: Wow, this is a great little anecdote. So the Scripps National Spelling Bee started in 1925 and that is the one that we've kept up. The first National American Spelling Bee was 1908. You can edit that. Did I say, 1925 is when the Scripps started but the first National Spelling Bee was 1908 and this came about almost as like this rebuttal or response to the simplified spelling movement. It was only 2 years earlier in 1906 that Theodore Roosevelt had brought simplified spelling into the Oval Office. Had directed his own presidential stenographer to recast all communication and correspondence in simplified spelling. He tried to expand that to the whole federal government. Didn't quite work, but it became such a hot button issue in 1906 that a lot of language purists, they really wanted to reclaim traditional English spelling because they really saw it as something that might go away if there aren't enough authoritative purists to hold it. 

The idea of a spelling reform that would bring the country together on the national stage was a way to give the spotlight our traditional spelling and turn it into a kind of puzzle, turn it into a kind of game, not something to run away from. So if a word like acquiesce or fuchsia never … It was no longer something that made kids squirm. It would be something that they, oh, now they could learn it, now they could treat it as a puzzle. They could treat it as something that they can master it. They could compete with their friends. All of this was trying to make traditional English spelling back to being the priority American spelling. And it was a way of rebutting the simplified spellers to say that we're back on the top. We're back on top. We're going to put this as the forefront and this will also be our first moment to showcase American spelling on this world stage. We're going to be showing that this is what American spelling is. This is who we are. 

And it didn't stop people in the weeks before the spelling bee to wonder whether there was going to be some shenanigans going on and they were going to have some simplified spelling questions in the spelling bee. I mean, this was really controversy at the time. It's hard to imagine that it is in our this day and age. But at the time, people were worried, we might be spelling differently tomorrow morning. There might be some kind of Elon Musk type person at the top who's going to say tomorrow starting at 9 AM, you're going to spell through, T-H-R-U and you're going to send me 5 bullet points of everything you've done last week.

Carrie: Oh God. Don't make me hate simplified spelling.

Gabe: So in the weeks before the spelling bee, there were some articles that said, is the spelling bee going to be in the new spelling or the old? There were some local spelling competitions in different areas of Pennsylvania and Indiana where local school-aged competitors kind of took a defiant stand against simplified spelling by refusing their first place trophy, which was a picture of Theodore Roosevelt or something. And there were other spelling bee competitors, champions who won, who took a defined stand in favor of simplified spelling, who refused to spell honest with an H, for instance. And it was kind of going back and forth and it was brought up from the local level onto the national stage and this was going to be the moment once and for all where we were going to define our language and define our linguistic identity. And this was going to be the end of the conversation. And it did turn into kind of a spelling bee mania. We still have it and the intricacies of English become something to master rather than something to fear. 

Carrie: The spelling bee is way less interesting with a simplified writing system, I think.

Gabe: I know. To spell something phonetically is a pretty subjective thing. 

Carrie: Yes, that's true. 

Gabe: It not only depends on whether you associate certain letters with certain sounds, but also what your accent is. 

Carrie: Yes. That's the main problem with simplifying this, right? It's all the different accents. Someone from Cornwall going to spell things the same way as someone from Vancouver? No. But I still think it would be simpler than the spelling system we have now. There will be slightly less intrigue. 

Gabe: So how would you spell intrigue? 

Carrie: Oh, in a phonetic way?

Gabe: Simplifie, yeah.

Carrie: I guess I-N-T-R-I-G, intrigue. No. I guess. I don't know. 

Megan: You wouldn't do a double I? I-N-T-I-I-G?

Carrie: I guess double I or double E, depending on your…

Gabe: So I think Noah Webster, he spelled a similar word, physique, which has a similar I as a double E sound. He spelled that F-Y-Z-E-E-K. So he went with the E-E. 

Carrie: Which makes sense in the way that we use letters in English. 

Megan: You have all these spellings in your head. To just scratch the itch for you of going down this hole simplified spelling or is this still your pet project?

Gabe: In terms of what I do next? I think I need to spend some time relearning how to spell. I'm telling you, I make the simplest mistakes in emails and it's because all my wires are crossed. 

Megan: I don't blame you. Of course.

Carrie: I have that problem even just with like I was saying, I have my Canadian spelling system, or at least I did. Then I lived in the States for over a decade and then now I'm copy editing and the journals always want either American English or British English, not Canadian English. A mess. A total mess. Is there anything that we didn't touch on that you would like to talk about, let our listeners know?

Gabe: I think we touched on a lot. Maybe 1 aspect would be fun to talk about is how the simplified spelling movement affected pop culture and advertising. 

Megan: Yes.

Carrie: Yes.

Gabe: Roosevelt in 1906, he really boosted the prestige of simplified spelling and it became such a conversation that simplified spelling slowly seeped into pop culture around that time. And in the 1920s, advertisers really started using simplified spelling as this marketing gimmick to catch the eyes of shoppers because just the novelty of a deliberately misspelled word makes you linger just maybe a split second longer over someone's billboard. And advertisers realized this and one of the tactics that became very popular in the twenties was using the letter K in place of the hard C, which goes back to Carrie's name. So this was around the time that we got brands like Kleenex, Krispy Kreme, Kool-Aid, Rice Krispies, Kit Kat. And it was just the gimmick of a K would sell more products. And some linguists had a name for this, they called it the craze for K. And they blamed it on the simplified spelling movement, which had been pushing words like character with a K and chorus with a K since the days of Benjamin Franklin and Noah Webster. 

Around the same time, there was a big trend for the letter U as a replacement for the entire word U. There were brands like, wear U Well Shoes, where the U is just a U and you need a biscuit spelled U-N-E-E-D-A. And again, people were attributing this to simplified spellers who had stirred the pot so much that us Americans really forgot how to spell. It was the way that they were characterizing it. And of course you can see the downstream effects of this today. Anytime you walk through a supermarket, anytime you listen to Top 40 Radio, the simplified spellings have continued to be an easy, eye-catching gimmick for consumers. Consumers of food, consumers of music, consumers of Prince albums. A lot of pop musicians realized that you could spell a name wrong and number 1, it'll still be understood and number 2, it'll give it an extra added angle that makes you wait, pause a beat. Like the word Beatles, B-E-A-T was deliberate misspelling of the insect and you have the birds spelled with a Y and the monkeys spelled without a Y. And you just see this run rampant through the 70s and 80s. 

Really, if you were to say that there were any successes in the movement, it was through these unconscious adoptions and absorptions into pop culture as a gimmick, as something aesthetic and visual. And it really led up right up to the present day. And I think when the internet came around, it was almost second nature for us to embrace abbreviations in this way. And I think that's what led to a lot of the shorthand you see in digital communication. 

Megan: And I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon. 

Carrie: Definitely not. Every once in a while I'll see a new abbreviation and almost every time I can figure it out. It's amazing. Every once in a while I actually have to Google. 

Gabe: That's how we stay young.

Carrie: That's how we stay …

Megan: We’ll see. Anyway, this was really fascinating. 

Carrie: This was so much fun.

Megan: A lot of fun. So we always leave our listeners with 1 final message, don't be an asshole. 

Carrie: Don't be an asshole.

Gabe: I agree with that. 

Carrie: Thank you. 

Megan: Thank you so much. 

Gabe: Thank you so much, Megan and Carrie. It was a pleasure. 

Carrie: The Vocal Fries Podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon, theme music by Nick Granum. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @vocalfriespod. You can email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com and our website is vocalfriespod.com.

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