Short Stuff: Simple Spelling Movement

Pretty much everyone agrees that English is a chaotic language. There are nutso rules of grammar and spelling other languages don’t have. More than once, movements have emerged to simplify English and each time they were beaten back with a vengeance. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:10Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry and Dave's here in spirit. And this is short stuff, which should be spelled exactly like it's spelled right now.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21Josh Clark?

  Should another simple spelling movement come along Chuck?

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, although they may drop an F.

• 1:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah, you're right. Although that could be stoof. But there is no such word as stoof. So I guess it wouldn't be a problem.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's what we're talking about. We're talking about the idea that English is a really tough language to learn and that there have been many movements over the years to simplify things and spell things out a little more phonetically. And back in 1906, none other than Teddy Roosevelt, who was president, got into this idea. And he was a very, very popular president. Who had some other very famous people on board at the time as well, right?

• 2:01Josh Clark?

  Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, William James, the father of psychology, and unnamed Supreme Court Justice. Basically, a lot of thinkers in America came together to basically put their might behind this, what was another progressive movement at the time. And Teddy Roosevelt was an enthusiastic supporter of it. He issued a, what he later called an experiment, an executive order to the printer of the United States, the official one, and said, "All federal documents from now on have to be printed using the simplified spelling of these 300 words." And gave them a list. And it ended up not going very well at all.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this kind of just goes to show you that you can be super, super popular as a public figure, or even a politician. And if you come up with an idea that people think are dumb, even back then, they turn on you pretty quickly because people hated this idea. He was all over the newspapers, being made fun of all of a sudden. And this is a guy that got a lot of great press.

• 3:08Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  He was in political cartoons. There was one where he was laying knocked out in a boxing ring with an anthropomorphized dictionary had just knocked him out. And Congress certainly didn't like it because he had sidestepped Congress with this executive order, and they were not having it.

• 3:28Josh Clark?

  No, not at all. Like you said, he was mocked for it, and his political opponents in Congress just jumped all over this because he was a beloved president, like you said, and there wasn't a lot that they could use against him, and this was great. So because there was an election coming up, he's like, "Okay, I'm backing off. You guys win. We'll just stay with the dumb rules of grammar and spelling that English has." And let's talk about that a little bit. You want to?

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Well, they actually even brought a bill against him where they cited Webster's. Like, they demanded that all federal documents be written according to Webster's or other generally accepted dictionaries of the English language, which is ironic because Webster himself was a proponent of making spelling simpler at one point. And it was also something I know that we've talked about. Benjamin Franklin had also championed this earlier in his career.

• 4:23Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and both Noah Webster and Benjamin Franklin had already found out that people don't like the concept of simplifying English for some reason, even though there's reason after reason to do this. Chuck, you want to talk a little bit about how English is kind of screwy?

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, anyone who's ever learned the English language knows that the spelling doesn't make a lot of sense a lot of times, and the rules contradict one another all the time. It's a tough language to learn, and you can look no further than the final three letters, GHT, at the end of words like caught and though and draft and drought, to know that there's just doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason. You know, if you learn English and learn how to spell in English, you're basically just taught like you just got to memorize this stuff. There are no rules which are going to help you out.

• 5:15Josh Clark?

  Exactly, and that is the reason why. I didn't realize this, but spelling bees are almost entirely an American phenomenon. They're almost entirely an English-speaking phenomenon because it's so tricky to spell English words, and that even countries that do hold spelling bees typically hold them as English spelling bees.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:35Josh Clark?

  Which is really saying something about how difficult it is to remember all this stuff in spelling the English language.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, although, to be fair, they're spelling, they're not spelling things like draft, you know?

• 5:49Josh Clark?

  No, no, they're spelling anti-disestablishmentarianism.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that one's not too hard, actually.

• 5:57Josh Clark?

  No, it's not, but it's the one that always gets thrown out because it's fun to say.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  The hard part for me would be

• 6:04Speaker 02

  doing it in my brain. I would have to write it down, I think. Emily was a champion spelling bee kid.

• 6:12Josh Clark?

  As was my gal.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they're both great spellers. I'm an okay speller. But yeah, I would have to write it down. I have a hard time doing that in my brain.

• 6:22Josh Clark?

  Yeah, way hard. It's much harder to do it just in your brain, for sure. I think you have to be like a visual person to be able to kind of see it in front of you, too. That's got to help.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:32Josh Clark?

  The, the thing I think that this, this, I don't know if we said it or not, but um, the group with Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain, um, they founded what was known as the, this is official, the Simplified Spelling Board. And what the Simplified Spelling Board was trying to do, as far as they were concerned, was just kind of hasten what was already an organic, naturally occurring process of making it easier to spell English words. And a really good example that I saw was that in Elizabethan England, or Bethen, depending on where you are speaking English, fish was spelled F Y S H E. And at some point, naturally, there was no board telling everyone to do this, which I think ultimately is what people's problem is with this.

• 7:17Josh Clark?

  It's somebody saying, "We're gonna do this now." Just naturally, it happened that people started spelling fish F I S H instead. Makes way more sense. It is easier to spell. F Y S H E was clearly the invention of a madman. So that happens anyway. I mean, that's also the reason why, uh, in the United States, we don't spell, um, like, uh, honor or color with an OU, like they do in the UK or Canada, um, or Australia. Uh, or we don't spell program with an extra M E at the end, because at some point, the people in the United States said, "We're just gonna start spelling this. It's just easier this way." And so what the Simplified Spelling Board was saying is like,

• 8:00Josh Clark?

  "We're just trying to move all this along to its inevitable conclusion. Do we have to wait like a thousand years before it just happens on its own?"

• 8:08Speaker 02

  No, but we do have to wait, uh, a very short time while we take a break, and then short stuff. We'll be right back.

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• 11:14Josh Clark?

  So again, this is not the first and only time people have proposed simplified spelling. There have also been other initiatives to not only simplify the spelling of English words, but also to kind of straighten out some of the weirder rules of grammar, too. And there's a guy named James Ruggles. He was an Ohio teacher. And he said, "We're going to spell no, K-N-O-W, the way that it should be spelled, N-O-E, in the present tense." Like, "I know."

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:41Josh Clark?

  Chuck is great. But instead of knew, K-N-E-W for past tense, we're going to say knowed. Like, "I've always knowed that Chuck is great."

• 11:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, you know, therein presents part of the problem. If you're a literate human and you look at something phonetically or say something like, "I knowed that," it makes you sound like you're, you know, maybe not so smart.

• 12:08Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  So, you know, that's, that's kind of the issue, is that the people always pushing for this are probably like the hyper literate, and they're not going to push for something that looks like it's not.

• 12:21Josh Clark?

  Well, yeah. But what's weird is you do have occurrences of people in history like Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie, like... It's weird, yes. There's like a roadblock in that, yes, people who are well-versed in English literacy do see this as kind of like there's something wrong with it. But those are also the same people who have kind of started initiatives in the past. So I don't know what the deal is. I don't know if we're ever gonna do this to you.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  I don't know. I mean, what I wonder is how far Twain and that board was pushing things. Because it's one thing to spell, you know, thought or though, T H O, which is how people do it on text now. Or T H O E, maybe. And then to say like, I knowed that guy. You know what I mean?

• 13:10Josh Clark?

  Yeah, no, I do know what you mean.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, one's a little further, I think, than the other.

• 13:14Josh Clark?

  Well, so, yeah, I'm not exactly how far they were pushing it either. But I do know that they backed off big time after Teddy Roosevelt got his his campaign hat handed to him by Congress, right?

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:28Josh Clark?

  So it just died down for decades. And it wasn't until the 70s that it came up again from a guy named Edward Rontholler. And he was the chairman of the American Literacy Council. He not only saw a need to simplify spelling, just for the sake that it could be simplified. He traced the problem of having trouble learning English and illiteracy rates to dropping out of school and then turning to a life of crime. So to him, simplifying English would actually help alleviate America's crime problem, which was a big deal from the 70s to the 90s.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, and he thought like, computers are coming along now. This will be the perfect time to make this transition because we can have computer programs sort of just convert this stuff automatically into the simplified form. And then before you know it, everyone will just sort of, you know, adopt this as it becomes the regular thing in computers.

• 14:26Josh Clark?

  Right. So, um, America seems to be doing pretty good. There's a 99% literacy rate among Americans. That seems to be like fairly where it is throughout the English speaking world. But something that I didn't realize, Chuck, is that that just talks about basic literacy. Like just being able to read, like you can sound out words and read. You understand the basic building blocks of English grammar. 99% of Americans know how to do that. But when you talk about functional literacy, it drops precipitously.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, this, this number surprises me.

• 15:05Josh Clark?

  Me too.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Apparently 21% of Americans are functionally illiterate.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Which, yeah, that's, that seems high, but you know, if that's the stat, that's the stat.

• 15:16Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and to be functionally illiterate means that you can read, but you have trouble navigating life as an adult in the English speaking world. Say like reading tax forms or something like that because you're basically literate, but not functionally literate. Yeah, 21% of Americans, by the way, equals 71 million people.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a lot of folks, so.

• 15:36Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  Uh, I mean, there's a case to be made. I think people are doing it on their own a little bit, like I said, through texts. But I don't, I don't think like, you know, proper graded spelling is ever going to change that much. I think that ship has kind of sailed.

• 15:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure. Uh, before we go, thank you very much to history.com, Time, PaleoFuture, Smithsonian, uh, and the Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Yay.

• 16:01Josh Clark?

  Who introduced this to me, oh God, when I was probably 15. We're finally getting around to do it, Chuck.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is, how many years later is that?

• 16:11Josh Clark?

  Uh, like 20.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Okay, great. Happy birthday.

• 16:14Josh Clark?

  Short Stuff is out.