Book Review: ‘Enough Is Enuf,' by Gabe Henry; ‘Pronoun Trouble,' by John McWhorter

New York Times

15-04-2025

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. Image
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