Gabe Henry
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It boosted its visibility in the pop culture. And little by little, simplified spelling began seeping into the pop culture. And this was particularly prominent in advertising. So in the 1920s, you get brands such as Kool-Aid with a K, Kleenex with a K, Krispy Kreme. And there was a name for this trend that was coined by one linguist in the 20s.
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She called it the craze for K. And she blamed this directly on the simplified spelling movement, which had been pushing words like character with a K and chorus with a K since the days of Noah Webster.
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Right. There are reasons that people have proposed for this. One is that K doesn't begin many words naturally in the English language. And often when it does begin a word, it's silent. So there's a novelty to seeing K begin a hard C word. So it catches your eye a little bit. it draws your attention to that aisle in the supermarket, the snack foods, the the Krispy Kremes, the Kit Kat bars.
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And then there's another possibility, which is that anyone who has dabbled in comedy or humor knows that K is an inherently funny sound. It's considered to be to have some quality about it that is just funny to the ear.
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Well, we are living in the digital world, and the digital world moves fast. And generally speaking, the internet breeds shorter and quicker content, shorter and quicker communication, just to meet our pace of life. And historically, a lot of these simplified spellers had the same motive. Efficiency, speed, a more direct... one-to-one correspondence, more direct one-to-one communication.
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If you can shorten that time it takes to communicate an idea to someone, that's probably the best, most efficient form to communicate with them. So a lot of the simplifications we see today in texting and in social media, words like though spelled T-H-O, through spelled T-H-R-U, these were initially proposed hundreds of years ago.
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and the irony is that these words never caught on when it was some kind of elite class imposing it upon the population but when it came from the bottom up when it came from texters and social media users and people typing it out with their thumbs for an informal conversation these did start to catch on so
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In a way, the simplified spelling movement has these downstream effects in today's world, but the difference is no one is trying to turn it into the authoritative way of spelling, the way that those reformers tried to do.
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Every generation has had these gatekeepers, these language purists, and they tend to see simplified spelling or texting shorthand as some loss of tradition or maybe the downfall of English as we know it. They're the purists that try to hold the language in its place. And then there are
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the people who look at these changes and they see it as a natural evolution, a kind of reflection of how language tends to bend toward that natural simplification that takes place when you have a more interconnected, fast-paced society. I tend to fall into that latter category.
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It does. And the reason it seems that way to us is because we have authoritative dictionaries. We have Webster's, we have Oxford English Dictionary. But these dictionaries are adding new words all the time, new spellings. OMG and LOL are now in these dictionaries, other digital additions like binge watch and selfie. And you're right that we see mostly additions of words and not
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Respellings of words, but I think over time what these dictionaries are trying to do is reflect language as it exists in its current state and as long as
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spelling continues to simplify in our informal communication i think that these uh language authorities will try to reflect that and i think you just have to look at the long the long arc of it the long timeline 200 years from now i would probably be surprised if we're spelling in the same exact way we're spelling now i would tend to think that it will become simpler and shorter.
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These are actually the only remnants of successful spelling reform. These come directly from Noah Webster. So Noah Webster had tried to push these radical extreme reforms in 1789. And these are words, like I mentioned, laugh, L-A-F, love, L-U-V. He even had the word tongue spelled T-U-N-G. And they all failed. he realized that they weren't going to work in a practical way.
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So 20 years later, as he's putting together his Webster's Dictionary, instead of pushing for these extreme reforms, he selectively incorporated some of his earlier simplifications, words like color and honor without the U, or plow and draft spelled without the British GH, which it continues to use today.
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And once his dictionary became widely used, these spellings gained legitimacy and ultimately shaped American English as we know it today.
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The word donut really came about in the early 20th century, 1920s, 1930s push for simplified spelling in advertising, which was really just a way to catch the eye. And Dunkin' Donuts
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one of the first large national chains to use that spelling d-o-n-u-t rather than the way more complicated d-o-u-g-h-n-u-t it caught on from there so that's an example of where advertising is influenced by the pop culture and then in turn influences the pop culture
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I don't know what to tell you, but if you take a word like physique, which I've always hated, you can clearly see a history in Greek. You can clearly see a history in French. But if you look at its two syllables, it should be a simple word to spell. But if you look at each individual letter, you'll notice each letter makes a different sound than it would typically be expected to make.
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P, H, even Y is used as the sound of I. S instead of the sound for Z. So it is stupid. It is dumb, I think. And... It's not that people are bad at spelling, it's that spelling is bad at spelling.
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English is unique in its spelling inconsistencies. French is a little bit inconsistent. It's probably second to English in terms of its inefficient use of letters. But English really is on its own in terms of the unreliable pronunciations, the unreliable spellings, the sheer number of pronunciations of the letters O-U-G-H. Though, tough, cough, bow. We're really alone in that.
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The reason being is we, England, was really subject to a lot of invasion over thousands of years. Viking conquests, new settlements, dialects, spellings, pronunciations. And we're just really trying to manage that.
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And we're really an accidental language that came together from many different regions, many different histories, many different peoples, and trying our best to pretend to be one homogenous language. Well, what a mess.
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There were early efforts. As early as the 12th century, there was one man named Orman. He was a monk. And his problem that he saw in English was the inconsistent ways that we denote long and short vowel sounds. So he came up with a solution of denoting short vowel sounds in which he doubled the consonant that follows it. So you take a word like... Sir, S-I-R, and he would spell it S-I-R-R.
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And he tried to get this to be picked up. He wrote a whole book of poetry in this new spelling. Ultimately, it was just too much of a sprawling lengthening of the language and what people really craved was something a little shorter. But his effort was the first to try to bring consistency to it.
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There were early efforts. People were proposing spelling words like laugh, L-A-F, though, T-H-O. The story of simplified spelling, the story of spelling reform is really a history of failure.
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Then there were efforts in the 1500s, the 1600s, and it was in the 1700s that it really became the domain of America and American intellectuals to try to simplify the language they were speaking. And it seems like they failed. They generally failed. The story of simplified spelling, the story of spelling reform is really a history of failure. It's a history of futility.
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It's a history of radical-minded, eccentric people highly committed to one singular idea and kind of blocking out everything around them, tunnel visioned on this one thing.
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so people were proposing spelling words like laugh l-a-f though t-h-o and these weren't just nobodies these were people like noah webster who was responsible for webster's dictionary he had radical ideas for simplifying every english word to its most pure phonetic essence and yes generally i'd say about 99 of these efforts failed
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There is a version of the simplified spelling movement that still exists. It doesn't have momentum, but there is a community of people that are continuing to try to simplify it.
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There were profit values, there were profit motives for this, specifically among businessmen in the late 1800s. They viewed simplified spelling as, something that would increase productivity and efficiency in their workforce. Let's say you owned a publishing company or a newspaper or even a factory.
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You would look at simplified spelling and see it as a way to save time, save money, because these words are shorter to write.
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you would save ink you would save paper and all in all you would be able to accelerate the productivity of your workforce that drove a lot of these people noah webster made some calculations back in 1789 and he concluded that his version of spelling reform which was actually kind of a more moderate
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he calculated that it would save printers about one page out of every 18, which doesn't sound like a lot, but for a 180-page book, that's 10 pages. For a 360-page book, that's 20 pages. And this is the kind of marginal profit calculation you're trying to make if you're running a business. So there was money in it, but I think the aesthetics of simplified spelling were always working against it.
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There are languages with silent letters. French has silent letters. The problem or the distinction between those languages and English is that You can learn a set of rules for those languages and the rules apply in most cases. So you can teach a child that in this word, you're going to have a silent letter after your S. In every case, you're going to have this following this.
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And once you learn these rules, you will know and understand spelling. In English, we don't have a set of rules that apply in every case. We have mnemonics like I before E except after C, but even that has so many exceptions it's probably not even worth calling a rule.
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We depend more on photographic memory of how a word is spelled as opposed to appealing to your knowledge of the overall rule system.
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That's a great question. I tell you that the people I've spoken to that speak English as a second language, they found it relatively easy to learn the grammar and syntax of spoken English, but very difficult to learn our spelling.
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There's a stigma surrounding poor spelling. So children that are growing up, six, seven years old, if they're told once that they're a bad speller, I think they carry that sense of inferiority into their life. I think it's the first intellectual merit assessment of how their brain works. I think it's the first time that
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an authority points to you in your life and says, you're not quite good enough for this thing. And I think that you carry that stigma for a while.
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Right. This trend came about in the early 20th century. And it came right after Theodore Roosevelt stuck his hand into the simplified spelling movement.
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So in 1906, he came out publicly and as a proponent of simplified spelling, and he made some efforts in his political circles to change the way his Oval Office and the federal government would spell in their correspondences and their communications. And his efforts lasted about three months. He was eventually mocked. And what it did, incidentally, was it raised the profile of simplified spelling.