The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell by Gabe Henry

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell by Gabe Henry Amazon.com Gabehenry.com 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.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go

on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. In the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed.

The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries and motivators. Get ready, get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hey, folks. It's Voss here from the Chris Voss Show.com. Ladies and gentlemen, the only thing that makes a fish a walk in the big show, as always,

the Chris Voss Show is a family that loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as, I don't know, your uncle who always gives you that side eye whenever you're at Thanksgiving dinner. But anyway, refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to Goodreads.com, fortunes.chrisfoss.linkedin.com, fortunes.chrisfoss. Chris Foss won on the TikTokity and all those crazy places on the internet. Today we're going to get into the learning. We're going to do some learning. We're going to talk about English, the language, as it were, or maybe just English people, for say. He is the author of the latest book to come out, April 15th, 2025. Gabe Henry joins us on the show. He's a multi-book author

and his latest book is called Enough Is Enough. The second enough is spelled E-N-U-F for those of you who are English technicians. Enough Is Enough, our failed attempts to make English easier to spell. We're going to be talking to him about his insights and we're talking about English language and maybe we can now fix a few things or break a few things or I don't know, we'll get into it. A Gabe author is the author of three books. I'm sorry, Gabe Henry is the little dyslexic today. Gabe Henry is the dyslexic he is acting up. Gabe Henry is the little dyslexic today. Gabe Henry is the dyslexia is acting up. Gabe Henry is the author of three books, including the poetry anthology, Eating Salad Drunk,

a humor collaboration with Jerry Seinfeld, Bob Odenkirk, Mike Bragagio, I'm butchering that because I have a camera in front of it. Bigly, yeah. Thank you, there's a camera right in front of it. Margaret Cho and other titans of comedy, Eating Solid Drunk was featured in the New Yorker in February 2022 and was ranked one of Vulture's best comedy books of 2022.

His work has been published in New York magazine, The Weekly Humorous, The New Yorker, Light Poetry Magazine, and Motion Picture Associations Magazine, The Credits. He has spent more than a decade exploring the strange and forgotten history of simplified spelling which by his own omission has only made him a worse speller. He lives and works in New York. Welcome to the show, Gabe. How are you? I'm great. Thank you, Chris. Big fan. It's a pleasure to be on. Thank you. It's wonderful to have you as well. Give us your dot coms or wherever you want people to find out more about you. It's

gabenry.com and Instagram is Gabe.Henry. So give us a 30,000 overview on your new book. Listen, Chris, I'm a little bit afraid of heights. Can I give you the 10,000 foot? Sure, let's just do that. All right. So the book is called Enough is Enough and like you said, the second enough is spelled E-N-U-F, which is very important.

I'll get to why in a second. It's a book for word nerds, history buffs, and anybody who's ever looked at spelling of an English word and wondered why the hell is it spelled that way? The book looks at the history of English spelling reform, how Noah Webster, for instance, he was the creator of Webster Dictionary. He tried to get all Americans to spell laugh, L-A-F, and love, L-U-V, and though, T-H-O. So, I was talking about Noah Webster and how he was trying to implement all these simplifications to our spelling. We're talking 1780s, 1790s. And the reason he wanted to do it was to distance America from England, because to him it seemed weird that right after the American Revolution

We have a we're creating this distinct government a distinct culture and yet we're still using the same language as our oppressor So he thought easiest way to declare Linguistic independence so to speak is use you know continue speaking English because it's hard to just change your language Overnight, but spell it differently Use, you know, continue speaking English because it's hard to just change your language overnight, but spell it differently. So he came up with spellings like through would be spelled T-H-R-U. Tongue would be spelled T-U-N-G, A-Q-U-S-A-K-E. And he tried to get these spellings to catch on.

He published an essay in 1789 called an essay on reformed spelling. And he was basically... It's like a Federalist paper for English. Exactly. And it was such an extreme proposal that no one took it seriously. He was criticized, he was ridiculed, and he ended up withdrawing this proposal. But what it did is it catalyzed basically hundreds of years of continuing proposals for what was called simplified spelling.

And so this has been going on for hundreds of years with dozens and dozens of different people trying to simplify spelling. Pete And so you profiled Mark Twain. He did some stuff with words. Ben Franklin, him too. I think he wrote some declarations for trying to burn today in 2025. Aliza Burns, C.S. Lewis, George Bernard Shaw and Charles Darwin because everyone knows most English evolved from species. Just making a joke joke there. So what made you interested in writing about this?

I first learned about it in college and I remember being struck by the sheer ridiculousness of it. You know, this idea that people were walking around in revolutionary times spelling the way some modern teenager would be texting their friend with these phonetic creative abbreviations. It wasn't until many years later when I actually started digging into the movement, reading through the articles and the archives and the journals and the letters that I realized how rich and complex it actually was. It attracted so many different characters, some of whom were clearly brilliant and some of whom were just absolutely out of their minds.

But they all shared this belief that you can possibly, you can change society in some small way by changing the way we spell. So I wanted to bring those characters to life and to show how, you know, even the smallest efforts to change the world can sometimes ripple through history in these really surprising ways. Yeah. I mean, technically all these guys just had to wait for text messaging to kick in and social media and then all the English language gone to hell. I think that's the irony, isn't it? No Webster was just born too early.

Too early, man. Before your time. So I was the same way. I was born before my time and I wish I would have been born maybe, I don't know, 100 years later? 200 years later. 200 years later. Somewhere around there. How old am I again? You know, maybe a generation or two. Of course, then that would make me a millennial or Gen Z. Maybe that wouldn't

work out as well. Anyway, we tease the Gen Z. We tend the, we tease the Gen Z. But no, I, you know, I've been guilty of the short-handing too. And you know, for a long time, I'm an author like you are. And so I enjoy wordplay and words. And I resisted, you know, the emoji. I still am resisting the emojis. I'm not giving that, I am not giving a quarter to that.

And if you get an emoji, if you get any more than one emoji or any emojis from me, I've been hacked or I'm being held hostage somewhere. Don't give them the ransom because I don't have any money anyway. But no, I started spelling your with your and I still struggle at 57 to make sure there's the RE on certain, you know, you are sort of bullshit. You know, I still struggle with it. Do you ever spell the word, do you ever spell the word you with just the letter U? Yeah, yep, yep. Started doing that. And I really hated myself for it. I really hated it. I was like, what the fuck? This is just really annoying. But you know, I'm single and chicks love emojis and they love shorthand and they love

texting and you just had to finally give up. And I mean, if you want to get laid, yeah, that's the only way it's going to have to work out. But the problem is- You gotta work on those exact kind of emoji. Exactly. Yeah. You got to do the eggplant and the whatever, the peaches. Anyway, I don't know what, I still don't know what those mean fully, I'm sure. I don't know what those mean, folks, don't get upset. But yeah, I mean, geez, we were joking before the show in the green room that your next book might be a book about just turning the whole English language, just give up on English language and we'll just live on emojis. I think there's some people that want that.

Jared Sussman Yeah, you know, if a picture is worth a thousand words, I would only have to have 50 emojis. 50 emojis. Even my mom, my mom's 82 and she's adapted to emojis. Like she knows how to do emojis really well. I think it's a chick thing. I don't know, maybe. But I don't get it.

But the young people do and I suppose that's all that matters because I'm old and out to pasture and they'll probably put me in a rest home any day now. But thank God I have kids. What were some of the other things, aspects of the book? I mean, are we really devolving as a society with all these short hands, you know? Because God knows the Gen Zers have to get back to, I don't know, ordering stuff from Starbucks and food delivery and, I don't know, buying cars that they can't afford and then wondering why they can't afford houses. It seems like that's... It's hard to know, I think, what is devolving and what is evolving. Because if our language is getting shorter, if we're kind of, all our formal digital

communication is getting quicker and shorter and more efficient, is more efficient necessarily devolving? It's hard to say. I don't think that there is one immutably correct or incorrect way of spelling in English. You know, there's only what's correct for a given time. So where were you when I was in school? only what's correct for a given time. So, Pete Where were you when I was in school? Jared Where were you when I was in school? I need you to defend me from my English teacher. Jared I hate to say it, but I don't think I was born yet. Pete Wow. Wow. Shots fired over here. Somebody call the authority. You get into the origins of

the Americas National Spelling Bee and the future of shaming students ever since. Tell us a little bit about that. Ben Jelinski I don't know about you, but I remember school spelling bees. I think everyone in America had some version of a local spelling bee and they, depending on the amount that they've repressed the memory, they probably remember the exact word they got out on. For me, it was acquiesce. Oh, really? Which today, to this day, I can't spell. Do you remember? Restaurant was, I don't know if restaurant, I failed the spelling bee, but I just barely

learned to spell restaurant about three months ago and I'm very proud of myself at 57. Yeah. No other language has regular spelling B's the way we do. In fact, the other countries that do have national spelling B's, places like India and Nepal and Japan, they conduct their spelling B's in English anyway. It's really a competition that's specific to the English language because of how messed up and un-phonetic

and irrational our language is. Wow. Do we have the worst language in the world? I mean, do we have the most? It's considered to be the worst spelling in the world, the least efficient, the least predictable. France is a little bit bad, nowhere near as bad as English. And then there are extremely phonetic spellings like Spanish, German, that have a corresponding one-to-one sound to letter relationship. When you see the letter C, you make the sound of C, as opposed to our language where a C could be the sound of Chris, K as in Chris, or it could be the sound of C, as opposed to our language where a C could be the sound of K as in Chris,

or it could be the sound of S, or it could be a Chuh, you know, it's hard to, or it could be silent, so it's hard to know. Pete Slauson I never really as my name is pronounced with basically a K, Chris Smolless. Yeah. Chris Smolless I think if you were to simplify the spelling of your name, it would be K-R-I-S and then maybe just V-O-S. Pete Slauson Dude, you could save me at least five minutes

a day with that or two minutes a day or something. I might do that. Jared Slauson Which means I think you could have saved eight months of your life at this point. Pete Slauson Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. You know, because I mean, some of this, you are into spelling and not math. So unless you have a form or

another book on spelling or math you're working on. But I was just going to say, I'm still in therapy for failing at the spelling bees that I went through and depressed over it. So thanks, America's spelling bee. Anyway, but no, I, it's kind of, I really struggled with the shorthand that really came from texting and social media. And part of it is, you know, I do have to communicate with a lot of people, but the problem is I also have to write in a business format. Like on emails, you look like a fucking idiot writing you are and sending emojis and you know, maybe things have changed now, but now, but I've sent emails to very professional

people writing stupid shorthand, like we're talking about. And they're like, what is going on? What kind of professional are you, buddy? Are you writing books and this is the shorthand you're using to people? And it kind of like, I think there were some comedians That did some jokes about how much time are these people really saving? What so they can go watch the Bachelor or something or the Kardashians because that's important Um, you know, it's kind of like when you watch the guy spend

20 minutes backing the giant truck into a parking space just so he can leave quickly and you're like Is that really a lot of time and that's how I looked at most of shorthand that I've seen in this whole pattern of touching on something yeah all right if you cut out for a second can you see you see me I believe so let's check. I think you're having some issues on your end with the feed and internet. Okay. Well, as long as it's getting to you on your end, we just touched on something.

Yeah. You touched on something, which is that simplified spelling. The one of the reasons it didn't, it never caught on is because it always looks like a kid wrote it. It just naturally looks like a child. So if you're trying to change the language of a whole country and you're trying to convince your fellow founding fathers that this is a good idea, it just is laughable and mockable to spell a word like love, L-U-V. It just looks like a four-year-old attempting to spell. And that's the reason it never caught on. Pete Yeah. So, why is it catching on now? Is it true that social media and massive texting

and people, I don't know, the devolvment of society maybe through social media? Because I mean, we've seen social media and how that's turned out. Why is it finally catching on now? It has to do with technology and speed and efficiency. So if I'm communicating to you by vocally like we are now, I might use a little slang. I might say, hey, sup instead of hey, what is up? How are you doing? You shorten things naturally because we're trying to communicate the most efficient way possible and in the shortest amount of time. And when technology comes about, like texting or in social media where speed and efficiency really are the most important thing,

and you can communicate in real time that way, it just kind of is a organic abbreviated way that we have of you can do this for X number of letters or you can shorten it. If you're trying to communicate in a way that feels like you're communicating in real time, we're just naturally going to shorten those spellings. And I think that there's also an appeal to a younger crowd. The idea that you could write in a non-traditional way is almost like a rebellion against tradition, against the older generations. There's something creative and fun and almost rebellious about texting the letter U instead of the word U. You see this also in song titles and rapper names. I think everything, all of it has to do with looking a little bit like you're on the outside

looking in. Pete So, maybe rap, did rap maybe help too on top of social media and texting and everything? Because, you know, shorthand and slang and, you know, what was the old plain joke about people being able to talk and jive, remember that? Maybe rap was- Talking and jive with the subtitles. Yeah, talking and jive with the subtitles.

You know when the stewardess comes up to the two black gentlemen and they're talking and jive and the one's sick and she goes, you know, she raps with them. Maybe rap is one of the proponents that's helped us kind of maybe de-evolve or evolve the language. Yeah. I think, yes, but pop music in general is one of the big conveyors of informal creative spelling. So if you look at, starting around the 1960s, I think a lot of musicians and artists started using simplified creative spelling in their band names and song titles. You know, you have the Beatles spelled with an A, B-E-A-T,

the birds spelled with a Y, the monkeys spelled without a Y, you know, and then into the 70s, Steph Leppard, U2, and I think especially it peaked in the 80s with Prince. If you look at his song titles, he really loved using that standalone letter and standalone number instead of words. For instance, nothing compares to you with the number two and the letter U. I would die for you with the number four. Oh yeah. I think that it, it really took off in the eighties, but the whole, the whole trend now is, is so ubiquitous that it's, it's hard to pinpoint who's, who was inspired by whom, but I really do think that it was the creativity of the sixties that brought it out of people.

Oh, that's it. Probably the drugs then the acid and the LST maybe it's the drugs. It always starts probably the drugs then, the acid and the LSD maybe. It's the drugs. It always starts with the drugs kids. Just say no. I mean, you try spelling lysergic acid. What is it? What acid?

You try spelling lysergic acid. Lysergic acid. I just, you know, I mean, there was a lot of great music that could have been better if it just would have been spelled right. Hotel Cali instead of Hotel California, maybe, I mean, what does California rhyme with anyway? What were the Eagles thinking for Christ's sake? I know. Why pick that?

I mean, what are the Red Hot Chili Peppers thinking every time they write a song? Yeah. Welcome to the Hotel Cali. That's more hip. No, it's not. Anyway, you do talk in the book about how the proponents of the K, there was a series of the craze for K in the advertising world. Tell us about that history. Yeah. So in the 1920s, there was advertisers. This is around the time Madison Avenue takes off in New York City and advertisers began using simplified spelling as a way to catch the, as a gimmick, you know, to catch the eyes of consumers.

Was it partly for trademark too? What was that? Partly for trademark and copyright too as well? What was that? Partly for trademark and copyright too as well? Yeah, I mean, once you spell the word, the brand Krispy Kreme, it's easier to trademark that than spelling it with a C, if you know what I mean. Because that word Krispy with a K just now becomes yours, it becomes associated with you.

And this replacing the hard letter C with the K was this very popular technique used at the time. In addition to Krispy Kreme, this is around the time we get Kool-Aid and Kleenex and Rice Krispies, all these words spelled with a K and K-Mar. I don't know if that was from that time, but I have to look it up. I'll have to add that into the second edition of the book. Pete Slauson Actually, I'm going off. Oh, it isn't on the list there. I thought it was. I'm going off the PR sheet and I could have sworn I saw Kimo, but my apologies. Yeah, it's on.

Jared Slauson But the linguists at the time actually coined a name for this. They called it the craze for K. And they blamed it specifically on the simplified spelling movement because the simplified spellers had been pushing words like character with a K and chorus with a K really since the days of Noah Webster in the 1790s. So they really pinpointed the simplified spellers as the cause and the person, the people to blame for this really annoying trend of the time, a trend that still continues. Well, I mean, once we've gone to emojis, I

think, I don't know what the next step is. Is there a bottom below emojis? Jarek Wiesel Telekinesis. Pete Slauson Telekinesis? Oh, a thought transfer? Jarek Wiesel Yeah. Pete Slauson Yeah. Jarek Wiesel Just upload a thought. Pete Slauson Yeah, that would be scary because I've met some dumb ass people in this world, mainly me and do I really want to be inside their brain? Like, that just, it's bad enough when

you get around some people and they're stupid or just from what they say or what they do, let alone if you get inside their brain, they might infect you with their dumbness. Pete Yeah, it's hard enough to be in my own brain. I couldn't take another person's. Yeah, or somebody who's one of those conspiracy theorists people who, you know, always claims the world is flat. You get in their brain, you're just like, oh my God, this place is a mess in here. It's like a hoarder's. The place is full of, it's full of 5G. It's full of 5G, yeah. It's hoarders. And everyone knows the world isn't flat, it's a triangle. Jesus Christ, people. Do your research. Anyway, don't start a cult over

that joke, please, people. Don't. Please don't. Anyway, you can start an OnlyFans, just not a joke of the triangle on the roof. Anyway, so you really delved into this. You dug into the history. You know, I think the most annoying thing that I find is what is, they call it the King's English, the Brit's English and our English, and you know, some of the things that they say wrong, like I'll see it and I'll be like, somebody's smoking some crack and then I'm like, nope, they're just from Britain. And then there's the difference in spellings between American and Britain.

Those also started with Noah Webster. Oh, really? The man, he was so devoted. Yeah. So after he tried and failed to push forward his extreme forms of simplified spelling, like tongue, T-U-N-G, he pulled it back, but he didn't withdraw, you know, he didn't give up on it entirely. And when he was putting his Webster's Dictionary together 20 years later, what he did was he selectively incorporated a lot of these simplified spellings into his new book. Words like honor and color without the U, words like plow, which us Americans spell P-L-O-W, but Britain still spells P-L-O-U-G-H, theater and center ending in E-R. These were all remnants

of his simplified spelling. And as once his dictionary became widely read, it lent legitimacy to these spellings and they ended up shaping American English as we know it. So whenever you're looking at, you know, a bizarre British spelling, like they spell draft, D-R-A-U-G-H-T. Pete What? Jared What? Jared You just have no Webster to thank for our simpler spellings. Pete And this is why they have bad teeth over there. No, I'm just teasing, that's not why. I teased the British, we love the British, we love our, we're comrades over there.

I think the problem is, is they drink tea and we drink coffee and we might be having some more caffeine and so we're just off on our own program over here. Democracy! Yes. What are you gonna do? You talk about, this was kind of interesting out of the book, the sheer absurdity of the anti-absurb alphabet, where they literally tried to turn all the English letters into numbers, is it correct?

Oh boy. So in the 1800s, there were dozens of simplified spelling proposals and each proposal had a different, a different quirk, a different attitude, a different angle. And some of them were pretty logical and phonetic and then there was someone named Banowski who in 1845 he published this proposal that tried to change all English letters into numbers so the way the way it worked was first you would reduce a word to its dominant letters so for instance if you take the word paper you would reduce it to the letters PPR. Then you take those letters and you bring them over to this number grid, numbered three by three, numbered one through nine, like a telephone keypad, and each number would

have letters associated with it. So you take the word PPR and you bring it over to the grid and you find that it corresponds to 994. And that's how in his system you spell paper. And it's so absurd. I mean, it's bizarre. It's beyond comprehension. But the irony is that his name for it was the anti-absurd alphabet. And he referred to all his followers as anti-absurdists. And he- Wait, he had followers? He hoped to have followers. Okay. Because I'm looking at this going, this guy never got laid, clearly. tie absurdists and he had followers. He hoped to have followers.

I'm looking at this going, this guy never got laid clearly. No, no, he, he couldn't use emojis. That's the reason he couldn't use emojis. That's why, yeah. Yeah. The chicks weren't taking the time. And he, yeah, this was just back then. You had to tell it back then. Yeah.

Type teletype through the dot, dot, dot, dash, dot, dot, dash machines. Very primitive stuff. Very primitive. Or smoke signals, one of the two. I tried using smoke signals to make dates and pick up chicks, and it hasn't worked yet. Unless you may set fires at their house, and then they tend to notice. Well, what about lanterns in the window? I find one for yes, two for no. Pete Slauson Oh, that's right, two for no. Yeah.

Or just have Paul Revere ride around with the horse there, eh? Jared Sienaar Right. Yeah. Pete Slauson But that's just wild. Paper would be 994, knowledge would become 256. And so, you just say 994 to people? Have you turned in your 994, sir? Jared Sienaar Well, it was purely a written alphabet and you would still continue to speak English as we speak

it. But on paper, let's say, I'm estimating, I'm kind of ballparking. Let's say if you save 50% of your time, right? You know, account for the learning curve of figuring this out and getting fluent with it. But theoretically, there goes, you know, you're saving 50% of time, 50% of money, 50% of paper and ink. And these people really thought in those terms. That's why they thought of it as the opposite of absurd, because anything that was the opposite of English, the ultimate absurdity would have to be anti-absurd. I think batshit Elon Musk or some really crazy person, maybe JFK Jr., should, uh, John F. K, or RFK Jr.

Whatever. Who cares? Yeah. The, I think one of these stupid people should, should pick this up and try and make it a thing again, the anti-assert alphabet. Like I think, I think this would be kind of fun to watch. Kind of like flat earthers. I think we're due for another iteration of the movement.

And I wouldn't be surprised if some person out of left field just says, you know, hey, Donald Trump's not a good speller. We know that from his Twitter account. I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to make everyone spell like him a weird random capitalizations and make that the law of the land. Well, you know what you need for that? Mill of the night Adderall and diapers. So there's that. Anyway, that's a Trump joke, folks. Anyway, this is the anti-absurd alphabet. I just love the name too, you know? It's not stupid alphabet, folks. Don't call it stupid. Anyway, don't call me stupid, duh.

But yeah, somebody should, you should write your next book this way. I think this is a fourth book for you. In the anti-absurd alphabet? Yeah, you should see if you can make another run at this. I mean, just, we got emojis. I mean, how stupid could that shit be? You know, numbers probably sound a little bit smarter. But then how do you do it if

you're going to say to somebody, hey, send me $50, the 50 is a number. And so people are going to mistake it for a word, maybe. I don't know. Yeah. You might be accidentally saying, hey, send me no dollars. Yeah. Maybe he made it so that the words would be numbers, but the numbers would be words. That makes no sense. Jared Sissling Oh boy, that just makes way too much sense for me to comprehend.

Pete Slauson I think we just broke both our brains with my stupidity there. But then, there's your whole new thing. That'll be on 4chan later tonight. Don't be a prophet and JFK will come back. He's been hiding clearly all these years and he's 150 years old. So what do you hope people come away with reading the humor and history of your book? Jared Sissling Well, I want people to look at it and to read it and say,

first of all, this is hilarious. This is absurd and hilarious and I can't believe that all these have come out of different human brains. And I want people to read the book and say, hey, I never thought about language this way. You know, I never thought that, hey, my name is Chris, and that C is a hard case. It's a K sound. Maybe there's a way of spelling that doesn't have silent letters. But I think, above all, I want people to understand that language is always changing. It's always evolving. It always will evolve. And despite our best intentions to try to push it into the future or try to pull it back in the past, it's always going to do what it does. It's always going to go in the direction it wants to go. Noah Webster had this quote, he said something, this is

a not direct, but he said the progress of language is like the course of the Mississippi. You know, essentially in that we, what can, the Mississippi will go where it wants to go. We can stand on the river bank and watch it, observe it, maybe we could paddle through it, but we can't change the direction it's gonna go. That water is gonna flow how it wants to, and that's the way language is. So all these attempts to artificially change the language, they don't work.

It's the organic ways of changing the language that do. It's the informal slang that we see in texting and on social media. The language always evolves from the bottom up. And I think that's what we're seeing. And I'd be surprised if in 100 or 200 years, if we weren't all spelling, using a lot more simpler spelling than we do now, a lot more closer to the way we use in our digital language. Pete Slauson Bottom up, how did North Hollywood hijack

that term? Anyway, moving on. See what I did there folks. Anyway, right now people are Googling that. Don't Google that. It might be bad. So yeah, it's kind of interesting. Did you ever think about trying to interview the band The Police over their song, do do do do da da da da is all I want to say to you. Like that was some high end English artwork there. That's, that's going to be for the sequel, Chris. You can hold me to it. Sting, what the fuck were you on when you were doing that? And I'm sure it was something. He's probably doing that, that 24 hour sex yoga or whatever he bragged about one time

20 years ago. Anyway, guys, if I can pull any more references from the Gen Z and millennials don't get, stop me while I'm still ahead. Thank you very much, Gabe, for coming on the show. It's been entertaining. You've written a great book and hopefully, I don't know, we'll see where it goes from here. For all we know, we're just going to be know if all we know just gonna be we're just gonna be in the movie

Idiocracy and we're just gonna grunt at each other which is you're really coming back to where we started when it comes down to it Yeah, thank you Chris. It was an absolute pleasure chatting with you. It was wonderful to have you as well, Gabe Thanks so much for tuning in order of the book where refined books are sold It's a fun read enough Enough is enough. Our failed attempts to make English easier to spell. Thanks for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress, ChrisFos, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, ChrisFos, ChrisFos1, the TikTokity, and all those crazy places on the internet. Be good to each other, stay safe. We'll see you next time.