Short Stuff: Simple Spelling Movement

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this show brought us on and off the screen. - Listen to, "Are You A Charlotte on the "I Heart Radio App?" Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. (upbeat music) - Hey, and welcome to the short step on Josh

and there's Chuck and there's Jerry and Dave's here in spirit and this is short stuff. Which would be spelled exactly like it's spelled right now. - Yeah. - Should another simple spelling movement come along, Chuck.

- Yeah, although they may drop an F. - Yeah, you're right. Although that could be stoof. But there isn't a such word as stoof, so I guess it wouldn't be a problem.

“- 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? - 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. - Yeah, I mean, this kind of just goes to show you that you can be super, super popular. It's a public figure or even a politician. And if you come up with an idea that people think are dumb,

even back then, they turned 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 like a lot of great press.

He was in political cartoons, it was one where he was laying knocked out in a boxing ring with a anthropomorphized dictionary, had just knocked him out. And Congress certainly didn't like it because they hid sidestep Congress with this executive order

and they were not having it. - No, not at all. Like you said, he was mocked for it. And his political opponents and 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, Wayne, 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? - Well, they actually even brought a bill against him where they cited Websters, like they demanded

that all federal documents be written according to Websters 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. - 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?

- 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, G-H-T at the end of words like caught and though and draft and drought to know that there's just

If you learn English and learn how to spell and English,

you're basically just taught like you just got to memorize

the stuff. There are no rules which are gonna help you out. - 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. - Yeah.

- Which is really saying something about difficult. It is to remember all this stuff in spelling the English language. - Yeah, although to be fair, they're spelling, they're not spelling things like draft.

- No, no. They're spelling anti-discestablishmentarianism. - Yeah, I think that one's not too hard actually.

- No, it's not, but that's the one that always gets thrown out

'cause it's fun to say. - The hard part for me would be doing it in my brain. I would have to write it down, I think. Emily was a champion, spelling bee kid. - As was my go.

- Yeah, so they're both great spellers. I'm an okay speller. But yeah, I would have to write it down and have a hard time doing that in my brain. - 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 gotta help. - Yeah. - The thing I think that this, I don't know if we said it or not,

but the group with Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain, they found it 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 Elizabeth in England,

or Beth in depending on where you are speaking English, fish was spelled FYSHE. 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, it's somebody saying, we're gonna do this now. Just naturally it happened that people started spelling fish FYSHE. Instead, it makes way more sense.

It is easier to spell FYSHE was clearly the invention of a madman. So that happens anyway. I mean, that's also the reason why in the United States, we don't spell like honor or color

with an OU, like they do in the UK or Canada, or Australia, or we don't spell program with an extra ME 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 is saying is like, we're just trying to move all this along to its inevitable conclusion.

“Do you have to wait like a thousand years”

before it just happens on its own? - No, but we do have to wait a very short time while we take a break, and then short stuff will be right back. (upbeat music)

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- So, again, this is not the first and only time

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 in Ohio teacher, and he said, we're gonna spell no KNOW, the way that it should be spelled N-O-E.

In the present tense, like I know, chalk is great. But instead of new K-N-E-W for past tense,

we're gonna say no, like I've always known

that chalk is great. - Yeah, so, you know, they're in presents part of the problem. If you're a literate human and you look at something phonetically or say something like I know that, it makes you sound like you're maybe not so smart.

So, you know, that's kind of the issue is that the people always pushing for this are probably like the hyper literate and they're not gonna push for something that looks like it's not. - What, 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 bro block in that, yes. People who are well versed in English literacy,

“do you 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 gonna do this to you. - I don't know, I mean, what I wonder is how far Twain and that board was pushing things. 'Cause this one thing to spell, you know, thought or though, THO, which is how people do it on text now,

or THOE, maybe, and then to say, like, I know to that guy. - You know what I mean? - Right, yeah, no, I do not mean you mean. - Yeah, one's a little further, I think, than the other. - So, yeah, I'm not exactly how far they are pushing it either, but I do know that they backed off big time

after Teddy Roosevelt got his campaign hat handed to him. By Congress, right? - Yeah. - So, it just died down for decades, and it wasn't until the 70s that it came up again from a guy named Edward Rahn-Tholler,

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 in a literacy 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. - 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 adopt this

as it becomes the regular thing in computers. - Right. So, 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, check 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. - Yeah, this number surprises me.

- Me too. Apparently, 21% of Americans are functionally illiterate, which, yeah, that seemed high, but, you know, if that's the stat, that's the stat. - Yeah, and to be functionally illiterate means

that you can read, but you have troubled navigating life as an adult in the English speaking world, say like reading tax forms or something like that, because you're basically illiterate, but not functionally illiterate.

Yeah, 21% of Americans, by the way,

equals 71 million people.

- Yeah, that's a lot of folks. So, 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 think like, you know, proper graded spelling is ever gonna change that much. I think that ship is kind of sailed. - Yeah, for sure.

Before we go, thank you very much to history.com, time, paleo future, Smithsonian, and the Uncle John's bathroom reader, who is just to me, wow, God, when I was probably 15, we're finally getting around to do it, Sean.

- Yeah, this is how many years later is that? - Oh, like to me. - Okay, great, happy birthday. Short stuff is out. (upbeat music)

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