Why isn't 'laugh' spelled L-A-F? Author explores the many failed attempts of simplifying English spelling

The Current24:24Why isn’t ‘enough’ spelled ‘enuf’? The absurdity of English spelling

Have you ever wondered why "choir" and "liar" rhyme, but "laughter" and "daughter" don't? Or why "sew" and "new" look like they should match, but sound nothing alike, while "kernel" and "colonel" are pronounced exactly the same?

English spelling is famously inconsistent, and for New York-based writer and editor Gabe Henry, that maddening inconsistency set off a deeper curiosity.

"I've always struggled with spelling in a moderate way, and I'm what you would probably call a good speller," Henry told The Current's host Matt Galloway. 

"So I think there's something inherently wrong in that — that you could be a good speller in the language and still struggle with it." 

In his new book, Enough is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell, Henry explores the long history of spelling reform. The book delves into the efforts of linguists, writers and thinkers who attempted to make English more phonetic and logical — often at great personal and professional cost.

"The more I dug into the simplified spelling movement, researched the articles, the archives, the letters, the journals, I realized how rich and complex it actually was," he said. 

He spoke to Galloway about his research. Here is part of the conversation.

Where does that simplified spelling movement begin?

The first simplified speller was a man named Orman. He lived in England in the 12th century, and he was a monk. 

His early attempt to simplify spelling was actually a way more complicated way of spelling. At the time, the real issue with spelling was how to denote a long vowel versus a short vowel. So the word "fir," F-I-R, versus the word "fire."

At that time, they didn't have the convenience of the silent "e" at the end of the word "fire" that we would use today. 

So Orman's solution was to add a second "r" when there's a short vowel.

Now, that didn't catch on. And it was several hundred years of silence in the simplified spelling reform community until [the] 1500s. They propose ideas for new alphabets, for new letters, for more phonetic versions of words.

It was really the late 1700s when this movement really kicked off.

Why did it explode then?

An important thing happened in the relationship between America and England, and that was the Revolutionary War — America declares its independence from England. 

It fights for its freedom. It wins it. 

Then in the 1780s, there are these discussions about now that we've won our independence, how are we going to distinguish ourselves from the culture of our oppressors? 

One of the ways that they wanted to distinguish themselves was in language. There were some people in the early American Republic who wanted to replace English entirely with French. There were other people who wanted to replace it with Greek. 

But a young man named Noah Webster came up with this idea to simplify our spelling. 

In this way, Americans would spell differently than the English, and therefore we would be declaring our linguistic independence.

What did [Webster] specifically want to do?

His idea was to take out all silent letters and phoneticize as many words as possible, like spelling "laugh" L-A-F, or "love" L-U-V, or "enough" E-N-U-F. It goes on and on. 

And he wrote an essay explaining this. Then a year later, he wrote an entire book written in this new spelling. 

He was mocked, he was derided, and he was ignored. 

And because of this, he withdrew his proposal. It did set off a number of other reformers who were interested in this, but Noah Webster himself kind of left that simplified spelling attempt behind. 

Why do you think he was mocked?

I think there's something inherently funny and ridiculous about the look of simplified spelling. 

It just announces itself as this dumbed down, low-class, uneducated version of language. 

When you ask a child, a five-year-old to sound it out, they're going to give you that simplified spelling version. 

And that was Noah Webster's intent. He wants spelling to be logical. He wants it to be more scientific, more mathematical. He didn't like that here we are coming out of the scientific revolution, and we're bringing sense and science and logic into every other aspect of our culture except language.

In the book, you talk about how spelling reform was associated with not just this guy and his one-person movement, but other forms of counterculture and protest movements that had a lot of people around them. What was going on there?

In the mid 1800s, the simplified spelling movement tended to overlap with these other countercultural movements. 

Let's say you were a spelling reformer in 1850. There was a strong likelihood you would also be involved in the movement for alcohol temperance, for vegetarianism, for mysticism [and] homoeopathy.

And most prominently of all was abolition. So many abolitionists viewed simplified spelling as a tool to accelerate literacy among newly freed slaves. 

In the years after the Civil War, many spelling reformers, and even some former slaves, would travel the South teaching the rudiments of phonetics, simplified spelling to these newly freed communities.

The idea among these abolitionists was not that they were giving some sanded down or dumbed down version of spelling to newly literate people. 

The idea was that they were given a more modern spelling, possibly the spelling of the future — here we are standing on this precipice of a possible linguistic revolution, and the first people who would get that leg up are these people who haven't had the opportunity to read or write their entire lives.

But it wasn't just an American thing, right? This has happened — some reform of spelling — in the home of the English language, in the United Kingdom.

Yeah, this wasn't restricted to America. This wasn't restricted to one kind of social reformer. The interesting thing about simplified spelling is that whatever biases or beliefs or priorities you have already going into it, you tend to see it reflected back at you.

If you're Noah Webster at the start of the American Republic, you're going to see simplified spelling for its patriotic value, a way to distance yourself from the culture and language of your oppressor. 

If you're an abolitionist, you'll see it for its social reform value.

If you are a money-minded businessman at the turn of the 20th century, maybe you own a newspaper or a factory, you will see simplified spelling for its ability to improve productivity and efficiency and shave off those costs at the margins, things like saving ink, saving paper, and therefore saving time, saving money.

At the end of the book, you talk about where we're at now with language. How have phones and computers and the way that we communicate now changed the conversation around how we spell things?

The digital world moves fast. 

Generally speaking, the internet breeds shorter and quicker content to meet our pace of life. 

There's TikTok and Snapchat and YouTube shorts. In text-based media, Twitter, texting, acronyms and other short-form, quick-paced communications. The sheer efficiency of this digital technology just selects for these shorter spellings, this more informal way of communicating with each other. 

Typing "though" as T-H-O, or "you" as the letter U are very common now.

And these exact reforms have been proposed dozens of times by dozens of reformers over hundreds of years. 

The difference is there's little resistance to it now because it is bottom-up. It is being pushed by everybody who has a phone in their hands. It's not being pushed from some elite intellectual reformer at the top. 

When left up to its own devices, language naturally takes that simpler path. It is more democratic. Every time we type to our friend the letter K instead of "OK," for instance, we're all participating in it now. And because of that, it's informal. It's unconscious.

I think that that will lead to the long-term reforms that those early reformers had hoped for.