The Current - Why isn’t ‘enough’ spelled ‘enuf’? The absurdity of English spelling

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

Everyone has certain words they struggle to spell, whether it’s stumbling on silent letters in words like “doubt,” or words like “fuchsia,” that just look very different from how they sound. In his new book Enough is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell, Gabe Henry looks at how spelling reformers have long tried — and failed — to simplify English spelling.

Whose take do you trust during this election cycle? I'm Rosemary Barton, CBC's chief political correspondent. At Issue is also where I listen and learn from the very best. Chantelle Bair, Andrew Coyne and Althea Raj. They are political heavyweights. They write and talk about politics for Canada's biggest publications and broadcasters, and they help shape the national conversation. So if you're looking for people who can connect the dots, cut through the spin,

check out the at issue podcast every week, wherever you listen. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. So we're going to talk about spelling now, which is I'll admit, kind of a challenge on the radio. You can't actually see the way I'm spelling the words that I'm saying, but bear with me here. Have you ever thought about why the words choir and liar rhyme, but laughter and daughter

don't rhyme? Why the words crease and cease both start with the letter C but sound different? This is all evidence that English spelling is absurd and why for centuries spelling reformers, people like Teddy Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw and others, have argued that we actually don't need to spell this way. Gabe Henry's new book tells the history of these largely unsuccessful campaigns for simplified spelling. The book is called Enough is Enough, our failed attempts to make English easier to spell, and enough in the title is spelled E-N-U-F,

which is important. Gabe's in our New York City studio. Gabe, good morning. Hi, Matt, thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. Is there an actual reason why words like laughter and daughter aren't pronounced the same way despite the fact that they have very,

very similar spellings? Yes, well, they both come from Old English, but they evolved in different directions over time. And the problem is that because of England's history and geographical location, it changed hands very often. So over the span of millennia, it spoke different languages. It was influenced by German, by Latin, by Norse. So a word like daughter and laughter, they were both originally pronounced the same, but because one strand evolved in this direction, one strand evolved in that direction, regional spellings and regional pronunciations took over. And that's why we

struggle with that today. Why did you find yourself really interested in this? In the weirdness of English spelling and also the attempts, as I said, by a number of people over time to try to make how we spell words simpler. Well, I've always struggled with spelling in a moderate way, and I'm what you would probably call a good speller. 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. And I first learned about this movement, the simplified spelling movement, way back in

college. And I remember being struck by just the sheer silliness of it. You know, aesthetically, visually, practically, it is a ridiculous looking thing. This idea that people were spelling though T-H-O and laugh L-A-F way back in revolutionary times and the middle ages like they were some gen Z teenager holding a smartphone. And that really drew me in the absurdity of it on the surface. But 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. You know, it attracted a really strange, eccentric cast

of characters, and some of them were absolutely brilliant, people like Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster, and some of whom were clearly out of their minds. But they all shared this belief that they could improve society, at least in some small way, by changing the way we spell. Can I go back to something that you said earlier, which was that you still struggle with spelling, but you think you're a pretty decent speller. Are there words in particular, I think there are words that just don't make any sense, and I see them in my mind, but it's hard to imagine that that's how they're spelled.

Are there words that you still struggle or that you remember struggling with to try to figure out how to spell them? Matthew 4 I think that anyone growing up in an English-speaking region remembers the word that they lost on in their childhood spelling bee. For me, it was acquiesce. Pete O'Loughlin Acquiesce. Matthew 4 Acquiesce. And to this day, I probably spell it accurately 80% of the time

But a hundred percent of the time I get very nervous when I start with that a and that C in that queue and trying to Remember which which order they go in one of my favorite Questions to ask someone is how to spell the word fuchsia. I Feel like five percent of people know how to spell that And it's that's probably probably the most complicated two syllable word I could think of. I'm imagining it in my head and I'm not going to say it in public because I'll humiliate myself.

I think I know how to spell it, but I perhaps don't know how to spell it. We should ask your listeners to take a poll. The other thing, I mean, you say this in the book, is there's a reason why spelling bees really are only common in English speaking countries, right? It's true. English is uniquely terrible at consistent spelling, consistent phonetics. We have a very irregular orthography. We have no set of rules that dictates that in this situation you're going to pronounce it this way, in that situation you're going to pronounce it that way.

And that's very different from most other languages. Something like Spanish is very phonetic. German is very phonetic. You have one sound, one letter. But in English, we have eight different ways of pronouncing O-U-G-H. We have a word like womb that rhymes with room, but not with comb. And it goes on and on. You say in the book that learning English can be a harrowing experience. I want to play something for you. This is a video that we found on Instagram.

It speaks to how tricky English can be. This man, his name is Etienne, grew up in five different countries, speaks seven languages, including Portuguese, Estonian, German, and English. English is very much the trickiest in a number of ways, you know. If you think of all the silent case that you have in the language, in words like knife and kneel and knee, and words that can be pronounced in different ways according to the context, read and read in the vast sense are the same word, or spelled the exact same. In knowledge, you have the word know, but you don't say knowledge, you say knowledge.

So you gave a couple of examples there. There are stories in the book about strange spellings and how they got that way. What is the story behind the way that we spell the word doubt? Oh boy. Well, this is a tricky one because the word doubt with the B, it comes from this misguided attempt to Latinize the language back in the B, it comes from this misguided attempt to Latinize the language back in the 1500s. It was almost an attempt to simplify how we spell. So already by the 16th century, scribes and monks could see that English spelling had become chaotic.

And at the same time, there was this renewed interest in the classical world, ancient Greek, Latin. And the idea was that to simplify English spelling, they could make it look more like Latin. Because Latin, in contrast, was solid, it was sturdy, it was a language that all literate people knew. So the thought was, if English spelling is so bad, let's make it look more like Latin. So doubt comes to us from French, and the French spell it D-O-U-T-E. But in this attempt to re-Latinize it, they stuck in that B as sort of a mnemonic for them to remember, oh, this is how you spell it. We know our Latin, and now we'll know our English by likening it to Latin. And you can still hear that B in some words like dubious or

indubitably. And they did this with other words. They did this obviously with the word debt, which comes from the Latin debitum. And they did this with receipt, inserting a P. And they did this with the word salmon inserting an L and a number of words that really there's no rhyme or reason that you could explain to a 21st century speller that would make sense. So there are people who have said, you know what, this is absurd. We're going to take the language back and we're going to simplify the spelling, cut it back to its essence so that it makes sense as you read it. Where does that simplified spelling movement begin? Well, the first simplified speller was a man named Orman. He lived in England in the 12th

century and he was a monk and 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. And 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 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 1500s, more

simplified spellers come around. They propose ideas for new alphabets, for new letters, for more phonetic versions of words. But it was really the late 1700s when this movement really kicked off. Why did it explode then? Well, an important thing happened in the relationship between America and England, and that was the Revolutionary War. So America declares its independence from England, it fights for its freedom, it wins it, and 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?

So 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, he was 27 at the time, he came up with this idea to simplify our spelling. And in this way, Americans would spell differently than the English, and therefore we would be declaring our linguistic independence. What did he specifically want to do? What did Noah Webster want to do? Can you give me an example?

Well, 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, and then a year later, he wrote an essay explaining this and then a year later he wrote an entire book written in this new spelling. Now he was mocked, he was derided, and he was ignored. And because of this he withdrew his proposal. And 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 looks the way a child would spell. So it just announces itself as this dumbed down, low class, uneducated version of language. And that was my initial reaction when I first heard about it in college, that it looks silly. And I guess that most people would have a similar reaction.

Because people see it as a shortcut or people see it as, I mean, you said dumbed down and uneducated, that if you spell enough E-N-U-F, that that signifies something? Yeah. ENUF, that that signifies something? Yeah, it looks, 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. I mean, there are other people who are further out on the ledge even than the Noah Webster, right? Who wanted to, they talked about completely reforming language, having a new letter system, using numbers for example as well. What were they up to? Yeah, in the 1840s, there were two proposals by two different people who didn't know each other and they both proposed to replace English letters with numbers. So the first one came in 1842 and this man August Tibbiden, he was a London professor and he proposed

replacing all vowels with numbers. So he drew up this three by three grid, numbered one through nine, and to each number he gave a corresponding letter or corresponding vowel sound. So number one would be the letter U as in view. So if you wanted to write the word view, you'd spell it V1 and the number nine would be an A and so on and he translated biblical passages as a way to demonstrate what his new language would look like. You have some of this in your book. It's almost impossible to read. I mean until you until you get it and then it feels like you're speaking in code. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, and his version was at least somewhat readable if you squint a little. But then 1845, a man named Bartolomey Benowski comes around and he proposes to change not just vowels but all English letters into numbers. And the way it would work is first you would reduce a word to its dominant consonants. A word like paper would be reduced to PPR, which seems logical so far. But then you would bring that to, again, a three by three grid numbered one through nine, and each number would correspond to a few letters,

like a telephone keypad. And you'd find that PPR lines up with 994, and that is how you would spell paper. In the fall of 2001, while Americans were still grappling with the horror of September 11th, envelopes started showing up at media outlets and government buildings filled with a white lethal powder, anthrax.

But what's strange is if you ask people now what happened with that story, almost no one knows. It's like the whole thing just disappeared. Who mailed those letters? Do you know? From Wolf Entertainment, USG Audio, and CBC podcasts, this is Aftermath, the hunt for the anthrax killer. Available now.

Why would they think that that would be a good idea? Boy, getting into the mind of some of these reformers is... I thought I was missing something. Oh, you are not. You are just not at that level of insane obsession that they are. So it was probably very logical for Bartolomey Banowski. And it was so logical, in fact, that he named his alphabet the anti-absurd alphabet.

And he referred to all his followers, of which there were probably just him, he referred to them as anti-absurdists. As you said, this does not catch on in part because it just looks silly. Absolutely. But this whole idea of spelling reform, it's interesting because,

and I didn't know anything about this, in the book you whole idea of spelling reform, it's interesting because, and I didn't know anything about this, 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, the suffragists, the abolitionists. What was going on there and how did they adopt reforming how we spell words to their advantage? Right. So in the mid 1800s, the simplified spelling movement tended to overlap with these other countercultural movements. 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 alcohol temperance, for vegetarianism, for mysticism, homeopathy, and most prominently of all was abolition. So many abolitionists viewed simplified spelling as a tool to accelerate literacy among newly freed slaves. And 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. This matters because, as you said in the book, English has long been a tool for gatekeeping, right? That's right. I mean, I think in a democratic society, the important word, big and bold, right there

in the middle is literacy. Literacy is the key to freedom, and for slaves after the Civil War, it was the key to joining society. It was, first of all, during Reconstruction, voting was restricted to literate people. So there was one way that, of trying to prevent former slaves of participating in the society and culture and voting for their politicians to represent them. So if you could give them the keys to literacy,

even if those keys are kind of, you know, sanded down a little bit and it's not the established form of spelling, it still gives them an opportunity to be able to write and to be part of that literate community yes, and Again, the idea among these abolitionists was not that they were giving some sanded down or or dumbed down version of spelling to Newly literate people the idea was that they were giving of a modern spelling, possibly the spelling of the future, possibly, you know, 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. That's really powerful when you think about it. I mean, it's easy to make fun of somebody turning the alphabet into numbers, but the way that you're describing it there is there's a lot of power in that. Yes, I believe so. Yeah. I mean, we in this country know that Americans succeeded in changing the spelling of certain words. Color and flavor are spelled differently, self of the border than they

are here in this country. But it wasn't just an American thing, right? This has happened, some reform of spelling has happened 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. It kind of has this mirror, this Rorschach quality. So like, let's say you're, 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. And again, if you're an abolitionist, you'll see it for its social reform value. And if you're, let's say you're 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. You have at the end of the book,

you talk about where we're at now with language. And I just wanna read this. You say that language doesn't evolve from the top down, it evolves from the bottom, from people who walk around with their phones and their fingers and their fingers in the pulse of the culture. How have those phones and computers and the way that we communicate now changed the conversation around how we spell things?

Well, the digital world moves fast and generally speaking the internet breeds shorter and quicker content to meet our pace of life. You know, there's TikTok and Snapchat and YouTube shorts, and in text-based media, it's 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 THO or you as the letter U are very common now. And these exact reforms, though and you, these have been proposed dozens of times by dozens of reformers over hundreds of years. Benjamin Franklin wanted

everyone to spell it, you, I, you, for instance. So what's the difference between what's happening now and all those campaigns that we talked about to reform spelling? If it's happening organically, how is that different than movements growing where people say, this is the future,

this is how we're going to spell things? 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 saying this is how we should do things and here I hear by decree this and people have resistance to it that top-down approach But when left up to its own devices, language naturally takes that simpler path. It is more democratic.

We're all voting for this simpler way of doing things. 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, and I think that that will lead to the long-term reforms that those early reformers had hoped for. You suggest that the rules of language and spelling are much more malleable than perhaps we might want to admit.

Right, and the authorities of language that we have today in English, those are mostly the dictionaries. Webster's, Oxford English, and they are, every year they absorb new spelling slangs into their dictionary, new digital words, OMG, LOL, those are now in those dictionaries. You know, I was, I was reading the other day this book by John Krakauer and he mentioned something that stuck with me. He said, and he writes about nature, he writesauer and he mentions something that stuck with me. He said, and he writes about nature, he writes about, he said something that most hiking trails in the world are not pre-planned. They follow the natural roots of animals and humans. Over

time the grass gets pushed down, the plants stop growing. And that's when the conservation authorities and the Forest Service comes in and lays their trail markers. And I think it's the same with our language authorities, the dictionaries. They don't create the trails for people to follow. They mark the trails that people are already walking on. That's really interesting. You know who is ahead of the curve in many ways in this? A spelling reformer who perhaps never thought of himself as a spelling reformer was Prince. Oh boy, was he?

So one of my favorite Prince songs is I Would Die For You, which of course any Prince fan would know is I Would Die and then the number four and then the letter U, which people might've thought is a bit weird and just kind of Princey, but it turned out he was a spelling reformer. Matthew 4.30 In a way, he was pushing a form of spelling that was unique for that time, using standalone

letters and standalone numbers in place of words. Now it's very common. But he was, yeah, he had this distinct way of spelling. My favorite song, Nothing Compares to You, with the number two and the letter U. He really loved playing with language. Pete Slauson So, having done this and fallen into this obsession with language and how we spell things and how people have tried to change things, are you, has this changed how you think about spelling? Are you somebody who, when somebody texts you and says, I'm going to be in another five minutes, you just text back K?

Jared Liesveld It hasn't made me more of a simplified speller. It has changed my relationship to spelling. I think it's made me a worse speller. Pete Liesveld But does that matter anymore? How you determine what better and worse is, I mean, in this time might be objective, right? Matthew 20 I mean, there's no correct way of spelling. There's only what's correct for a given time. You know, Shakespeare was spelling in a way that's incorrect for us now. And I think that

we're spelling in a way that, given enough time, the span of maybe hundreds of years will be incorrect for those future people. And I don't think it's our responsibility to try to drive the change forward. And I don't think it's our responsibility to try to drive the change forward, and I don't think it's our responsibility to try to hold it in place. I think we have to let the language do what it does, meander where it wants to meander, evolve how it wants to evolve. And I think we're wasting our time trying to guide it. So I don't know if I would side with the Reformers or with the purists who try to hold it back. I think I'm just floating in that river.

As we all are, with the phones in our hands, spelling things the way that we try to hold it back. I think I'm just floating in that river. As we all are with the phones in our hands, spelling things the way that we want to spell them. Gabe, this is a really interesting book and I'm glad to talk to you about it. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Matt. Gabe Henry's new book is called Enough Is Enough, Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell.

Fuchsia, by the way, is spelled F-U-C-H-S-I-A. What do you make of the idea of making spelling simpler? Is there a word that regularly trips you up? Bureau, for me, is one of those words that doesn't look like the way that I think it should look in my mind. And I always, I just can't get it right. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.