Gabe Henry is an American humorist with a couple of funny books under his belt, including What the Fact: 365 Strange Days in History – which was an Amazon #1 Bestseller in the History‑Humor category – and Eating Salad Drunk: Haikus for the Burnout Age, a collection of poems by other humorists. His new book, Enough is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell, explores schemes – some best laid, some not – to reform English spelling because, as everyone knows, English spelling is not phonetic and, over time, spelling and speech have become misaligned. Henry explains why English spelling led Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster, members of the Church of Latter‑Day Saints, shorthand secretaries, American presidents, fellow humorists of past and present, and teenagers to complain about historical English spelling and what they each in their time and place proposed to do about it.

Enough is Enuf is a pleasure to read unless you’re a historian of English language because Gabe Henry is not a historical linguist, and it shows. Indeed, it shows on my dust cover, which reads ‘enough is enough enuph eenuff enuf,’ leading us to think that simplified spelling would progress from enough to enuf. But someone with even a smattering of English phonetics would doubt that spelling, because the sound represented by the e and the sound represented by the u are the same sound for most speakers: unuf, with a schwa in the first syllable and a stressed schwa (called a wedge) in the second. Or, the e is the /i/ in beet, in which case it should be eenuf to parallel eezier in the subtitle. I wondered whether Henry had heard about the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is not only more accurate than historical spelling in distinguishing speech sounds but, because it’s reliable, simpler, too. He does know about it, because it’s mentioned in a footnote on page 26. The title page does not repeat the cover’s jokey respellings, and I’d say we shouldn’t judge Enough is Enuf by its cover – perhaps due to marketing more than the author’s preference, anyway – except that, unfortunately, the cover predicts pretty well what’s inside.

When Henry writes about the Viking invasions of England in the ninth century C.E., for instance, he claims that Norse speakers had a ‘preference for SK sounds’ so ‘turned shirt into skirt’ and ‘ship became skip.’ But these words don’t reflect a ‘preference’; they reflect the dialectal divergence of West and North Germanic – they are baked into the languages. So, in the end, it’s not a matter of turning one form into another but adopting one form rather than the other or retaining both forms but distributing meaning differently between them (shirt and skirt, for instance). Henry claims that skull, scream, ransack, heathen, slaughter, leg, skin, anger, hit, die, knife and snare are all words borrowed from Old Norse, which is about 40 percent correct: scream, skull, heathen, skin, and knife aren’t clearly Norse in origin – other Germanic languages of the time include forms of those words with k/sk sounds, and these words may have come to England with Anglo‑Saxon invaders at an earlier date. (It took me all of 15 minutes to confirm my suspicions of this by checking the Oxford English Dictionary – I’m sure Henry is busy, but I’m equally sure he could have found 15 minutes for the sake of accuracy.) Henry notes, puckishly, that many of the words in his list ‘incidentally, describe a particularly vivid Viking battle.’ I appreciated the joke, but it distorts Old Norse influence on English by stereotype: Old Norse egg is, after all, a much more frequently used word than ransack or snare, and surely more domestic, unless the Vikings pelted their Anglo‑Saxon adversaries with eggs.

I’m still in Chapter 2, where we’re told that William Caxton, England’s first printer, chose to write and publish, not in his Kentish dialect, but in ‘a variety of East Midlands called Chancery Standard, the dialect of London’s universities and courts.’ Henry adds, ‘Chancery was associated with nobility, in part because it contained scores of French loanwords’ (p. 19). Supposedly, Chancery Standard becomes Standard English. But, simply, no. The universities were not in London, nor in 1486 were they nearby. Chancery included a lot of French, not because ‘Mots de France still carried the elegance they had when the Normans ruled the English aristocracy’ (p. 19), but because Chancery clerks were lawyers, not aristocrats, and French was an essential language in English law until the 18^th century. So, the dialect wasn’t associated with aristocrats, mainly, but clerks. Chancery English may well have influenced late‑medieval and early modern English, as the language standardized, but there is considerable scholarly argument about the kinds and degree of that influence, even with regard to written English, with most historical linguists concluding that the genesis of a standard was complex, and most likely emerging from ‘below’, that is, among ordinary people, rather than having been imposed from ‘above’ on the wide variety of English speakers, most of whom were unlettered. Even if the so‑called Chancery Standard influenced the development of written English, it had very little to do with standard spoken English.

Then, there are the less serious simplifications, for example, those of brand names afflicted with the ‘Kraze for K’ (Kool‑Aid, Kleenex, Krispy Kreme, and Kit Kats, to borrow some of Henry’s examples) as Louise Pound called it in an article published in American Speech in 1925. Then, there are all the song titles that substitute numbers for words (MC Hammer’s ‘2 Legit 2 Quit’, which, one notices, in simplified spelling obscures the difference between too and to, for what it’s worth). And txtspk gets its own chapter, which only seems fitting, and, in fact, may be most important in future simplifying because, again, it bubbles up from everyday use by everyday speakers – it isn’t legislated by clerks, lexicographers, robber barons, Presidents of the United States or any other deliberate reformers, the full array of which we encounter in Henry’s book.

My concerns may seem like nitpicking to some, not least to the author, but I would not rely on Enough Is Enuf for the history of English. Otherwise, the book is cleanly written, often fun or funny, and it covers an array of subjects likely to attract casual readers. Its appendices are winners, first ‘An (Abbreviated) Dictionary of Simplified Spelling,’ which illustrates many of Webster’s proposed American spellings. Readers love lists, and this one is informative and entertaining, though it isn’t long enough to give anyone a sense of Webster’s system. Even more interesting is ‘Muzik and Liriks,’ though here it’s hard to explain why two different vowels in Liriks are spelled the same. Henry translates English into various reformed spellings: stanzas of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ as spelled by Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster, Auguste Thibaudin, and the Spelling Reform Association; ‘Rockin’ Robin’ à la Franklin again; ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ in the spelling style of Orm, the first known (12^th‑century) spelling reformer; ‘Old McDonald Had a Farm’ as the Anti‑Absurd Alphabet would have had it in 1844; and Cole Porter’s ‘Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love)’ as Melvil Dewey would have spelled it (that is, the Dewey of Dewey Decimal System fame – he loved systems and re‑organizing things and even respelled his first name). The respelled songs allow any of us (since we probably know the songs) to test the viability of particular approaches to spelling reform.

Henry observes on both the cover and the title page that our attempts ‘to make English eezier [or, on the title page, standard easier] to spell’ have ‘failed,’ but he never acknowledges the biggest challenge to spelling reform. As he puts it early on, there have been so many languages in contact with English and so many sound changes over time that formerly sensible spelling diverged from the sounds we actually made in the production of words. Henry’s reformers attempted to fix English spelling once and for all. Of course, the phonologies of varieties of English today vary, and they will change in ways that any reformed spelling system won’t capture. We could engage in endless cycles of spelling reform – or we could leave well enough alone. It gives us something to complain about, as Henry amply proves in this interesting and engaging, if not wholly accurate, book.