ENOUGH IS ENUF: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell, by Gabe Henry
PRONOUN TROUBLE: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words, by John McWhorter
A century ago, one of the richest men in the world decided to wade into the public sphere by throwing his weight behind a series of cuts that would reach into every corner of American life. The president of the day, sensing early support for these reforms and not wishing to be left behind, jumped on board with impulsive zeal, demanding that all federal offices implement the cutbacks with immediate effect.
The year was 1906, the protagonists Andrew Carnegie and Theodore Roosevelt, and the campaign was the movement for simplified spelling, which proposed to trim the fat from the English language by turning words like “through” and “although” into “thru” and “altho.”
The president’s fervor would prove incautious. Stripping the written language of its historical idiosyncrasies is by no means an easy sell. After all, we have a kind of sunk-cost attachment to difficult words since we expended so much effort in learning them as children. With characteristic circumspection, The New York Times summarized the mood around “missed” becoming “mist”: “This prospect, of course, will be pleasing to far from everybody.”
Sure enough, the public’s taste for simplified spelling turned out to be considerably less radical than the reformers had supposed. A climb down was inevitable. Within months, the House of Representatives had passed a resolution to undo the president’s hasty decree. At that year’s Gridiron Dinner, an annual gathering of top Washington journalists and politicians, humiliation was gleefully served up to the president in the form of a mock dictionary (“Dikshunary”) heralding an end to the “long period of Intellektual Darkness preseding the Assumpshun uv Universal Supervizhun by Theodore Rozavelt.”
This incident is recounted in Gabe Henry’s “Enough Is Enuf,” a rich and engaging history of the attempts, from the 16th century to the present day, to bring written English into line with the way we speak. There’s an enjoyable wryness to the way Henry presents his linguistic idealists, headstrong in the face of public indifference or ridicule. He also has a nose for the memorable detail, such as the way a 19th-century advertising craze for substituting a “k” for a hard “c” in brand names — Klenzo toothpaste, Kant-Leek water bottles, Nuklene shoe whitener — has left a grim legacy in the gimmick-spelled Ku Klux Klan. Or the fact that Melvil Dewey, of Dewey Decimal fame, was plain old Melville before he simplified his name.
It’s fascinating to realize how instinctive our attachment to spelling is, even if we might be broadly in favor of the simplifiers’ intentions. Watch how the Spelling Reform Association’s title became incrementally more performative over the course of six years:
The Spelling Reform Association (1876)
The Speling Reform Asoshiashun (1877)
Dhi Speling Reform Asoshiashun (1881)
Dhi Speling Reform Asoshiēshun (1882)
At what point do you find yourself saying, “Oh, stop it!”?
What becomes apparent in the later chapters is how much more comfortable we are with spelling evolution than spelling reform, with change that comes from the bottom up rather than the top down. If a shift in spelling is underway at the moment, it has been driven by the constraints of texting and social media, rather than by the pet projects of presidents and billionaires and lobbying asoshiashuns.
Those who flinch at the fondness of texters and certain musicians for “U” in place of “you” might do well to look at the example of “I.” Up until the Middle Ages, the first-person subject pronoun in English was “ic” or “ich.” You can still find the latter in Chaucer. The intervening centuries, however, have rubbed the edges off. The story of “I” can be found in John McWhorter’s “Pronoun Trouble,” a short but stylish run through the genealogies of these small, vital words that are “at the very foundation of human expression at all times.”
McWhorter, a distinguished linguist and New York Times contributor, says his title comes from a Looney Tunes cartoon, “Rabbit Seasoning,” in which the phrase is blurted out by an indignant but confused Daffy Duck. But it’s hard not to suspect that McWhorter also has a sly eye on Judith Butler’s 1990 work “Gender Trouble,” which is more or less the founding text for the decoupling of biological sex from lived gender and, latterly, the practice of sharing one’s pronouns. “Pronouns have a way of stirring up trouble,” McWhorter writes with a mischievous understatement.
But “Pronoun Trouble” is far more than simply a rehearsal of our current debates about gender-neutral address. McWhorter, blessed with a chatty and accessible manner, leads us methodically along the pronoun table, through “I,” “you,” “he,” “she” and “it,” and all the controversies they have stirred up over the last thousand years. A recurring theme is that pedants and purists tend to be blind to the longer history of the language: “Y’all,” for example, performs a role that has been lacking since “ye” dropped out of usage; and modern sniffiness toward a sentence like “Billy and me went to the store” (as opposed to “Billy and I”) is the fault of a handful of Latin fetishists in the 18th century.
Readers intending to be outraged at how McWhorter tackles “they”/“them” as singular, gender-neutral pronouns will have to wait until the very end. By this point, however, they should have gleaned that his approach is generous, measured and historically informed. The final chapter is no different. Singular “they,” McWhorter reminds us, was used by Chaucer, Jane Austen and the translators of the King James Bible. It was only Lindley Murray’s “English Grammar,” which appeared in the 1790s, that turned public opinion (or rather that of editors and pedants) against the practice.
McWhorter imagines that over time we will, by and large, get used to using “they”/“them” for people who wish to avoid being identified as a “he” or a “she.” He even has a suggestion: Why not reduce confusion by using singular verb forms when “they” is being used in a singular context? “Who they is” and “what they wants.” This prospect, of course, will be pleasing to far from everybody.
ENOUGH IS ENUF: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell | By Gabe Henry | Dey Street | 287 pp. | $28
PRONOUN TROUBLE: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words | By John McWhorter | Avery | 223 pp. | $28
The post The Centuries-Long Struggle to Make English Words Behave appeared first on New York Times.
