April 1, 2026 • 12 mins
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.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck, and there's Jerry, and dats here and spirit
and this is short stuff, which should be spelled exactly
like it's spelled right now. Yeah, Should another simple spelling
movement come along, Chuck?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Yeah, although they may drop an F.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Yeah, you're right, although that could be stuff, but there
is no such word as stuff, so I guess it
wouldn't be a problem.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
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 nineteen oh six, 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
(00:51):
famous people on board at the time as well.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Right Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, William James, the father of
psychology and named 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
(01:15):
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 three hundred words,
and gave them a list. And it ended up not
(01:37):
going very well at all.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, I mean, this kind of just goes to show
you that you can be super super popular as a
public figure or as 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 got like a lot of great press, right.
(02:02):
He was in you know, political cartoons. It was one
where he was laying knocked out in a boxing ring
with a anthropomorpize dictionary had just knocked him out. And
Congress certainly didn't like it because they he had sidestepped
Congress with this executive order and they were not having it.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
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
(02:45):
rules of grammar and spelling that English has, and let's
talk about that a little bit.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
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 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
(03:11):
that we've talked about. Benjamin Franklin had also championed this
earlier in his career.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
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
kought and though and draft and drought to know that
(03:58):
there's just doesn't seem to be any rise, 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 of
which are going to help.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
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 in 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
(04:31):
how difficult it is to remember all this stuff in
spelling the English language.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Yeah, although to be fair, they're spelling, they're not spelling
things like draft, you know.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
No, No, they're spelling anti disestablishmentarianism.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Yeah, I think that one's not too hard.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Actually no it's not, but it's the one that always
gets thrown out because it's fun to say.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
The hard part for me would be, uh, doing it
in my brain. I would have to write it down,
I think Itily was a champion spelling bee.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Kid, as was my gal.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
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. Yeah. The thing I think that I don't
know if we said it or not, but the group
with Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain, they founded what was
known as the This is Official the Simplified Spelling Board.
(05:39):
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 Elizabeth in
England or Bethan, depending on where you are speaking English.
(06:00):
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 going to do this now. Just naturally,
it happened that people started spelling fish fish instead. It
makes way more sense. It is easier to spell f y.
(06:22):
She 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
(06:46):
people in the United States said, we're just going to
start spelling this. It's just easier this way. And so
what the simplified spelling board was saying is like, 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.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
No, but we do have to wait a very short
time while we take a break and then short stuff
will be right back.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
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 gonna spell no k n o W the way
(07:52):
that it should be spelled n oe in the present tense,
like I know chuck is great, but instead of k
n e W for past tense, we're gonna say nod,
like I've always knowed that chuck is great.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
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 knowed that it makes
you sound like you're, you know, maybe not so smart, right,
So you know that's that's kind of the issue, is
that the people always pushing for this are probably like
(08:31):
the hyper literate, and they're not gonna push for something
that looks like it's not well.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
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 do
see this as kind of like there's something wrong with it.
But those are also the same people who have kind
(08:59):
of started initiatives in the past. So I don't know
what the deal is. I don't know if we're ever
going to do this to you.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
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 thcho,
which is how people do it on text now or
thhoe maybe, and then to say like I knowed that guy,
you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Yeah, No, I do know you mean.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Yeah, one's a little further I think than the other.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Well, so yeah, I'm not exactly how farther or 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, Yeah, So it just
died down for decades, and it wasn't until the seventies
that it came up again from a guy named Edward
(09:51):
ron Thaler, and he was the chairman of the American
Literacy Council. He not only saw a need to simplify
spelling for the sake that it could be simplified, he
traced the problem of having trouble learning English and a
literacy rates to dropping out of school and then turning
(10:13):
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 seventies to the nineties.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Yeah, and he thought, like, the 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.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Right, So, America seems to be doing pretty good. There's
a ninety nine percent 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 that
that just talks about basic literacy, like just being able
(11:04):
to read, like you can sound out words and read,
you understand the basic building blocks of English grammar. Ninety
nine percent of Americans know how to do that. But
when you talk about functional literacy, it drops precipitously.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Yeah, this number surprises me me too. Apparently twenty one
percent of Americans are functionally illiterate, which, yeah, that's that
seems high, but you know, if that's the stat that's
the stat.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
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.
Twenty one percent of Americans, by the way, equal seventy
one million people.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Yeah, that's a lot of folks. So yeah, 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.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Yeah for sure. Before we go, thank you very much
to History dot Com, Time, Paleo, Future, Smithsonian, Uh, and
the Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, who is takes this to me,
Oh god, when I was probably fifteen. We're finally getting
around to do it.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Shocking. Yeah, this is how many years later is that? Oh?
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Like Tony?
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Okay, great, Happy birthday.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Short stuff is out.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
You Know. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck, and there's Jerry, and dats here and spirit
and this is short stuff, which should be spelled exactly
like it's spelled right now. Yeah, Should another simple spelling
movement come along, Chuck?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Yeah, although they may drop an F.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Yeah, you're right, although that could be stuff, but there
is no such word as stuff, so I guess it
wouldn't be a problem.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
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 nineteen oh six, 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
(00:51):
famous people on board at the time as well.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Right Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, William James, the father of
psychology and named 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
(01:15):
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 three hundred words,
and gave them a list. And it ended up not
(01:37):
going very well at all.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, I mean, this kind of just goes to show
you that you can be super super popular as a
public figure or as 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 got like a lot of great press, right.
(02:02):
He was in you know, political cartoons. It was one
where he was laying knocked out in a boxing ring
with a anthropomorpize dictionary had just knocked him out. And
Congress certainly didn't like it because they he had sidestepped
Congress with this executive order and they were not having it.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
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
(02:45):
rules of grammar and spelling that English has, and let's
talk about that a little bit.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
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 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
(03:11):
that we've talked about. Benjamin Franklin had also championed this
earlier in his career.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
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
kought and though and draft and drought to know that
(03:58):
there's just doesn't seem to be any rise, 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 of
which are going to help.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
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 in 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
(04:31):
how difficult it is to remember all this stuff in
spelling the English language.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Yeah, although to be fair, they're spelling, they're not spelling
things like draft, you know.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
No, No, they're spelling anti disestablishmentarianism.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Yeah, I think that one's not too hard.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Actually no it's not, but it's the one that always
gets thrown out because it's fun to say.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
The hard part for me would be, uh, doing it
in my brain. I would have to write it down,
I think Itily was a champion spelling bee.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Kid, as was my gal.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
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. Yeah. The thing I think that I don't
know if we said it or not, but the group
with Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain, they founded what was
known as the This is Official the Simplified Spelling Board.
(05:39):
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 Elizabeth in
England or Bethan, depending on where you are speaking English.
(06:00):
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 going to do this now. Just naturally,
it happened that people started spelling fish fish instead. It
makes way more sense. It is easier to spell f y.
(06:22):
She 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
(06:46):
people in the United States said, we're just going to
start spelling this. It's just easier this way. And so
what the simplified spelling board was saying is like, 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.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
No, but we do have to wait a very short
time while we take a break and then short stuff
will be right back.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
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 gonna spell no k n o W the way
(07:52):
that it should be spelled n oe in the present tense,
like I know chuck is great, but instead of k
n e W for past tense, we're gonna say nod,
like I've always knowed that chuck is great.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
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 knowed that it makes
you sound like you're, you know, maybe not so smart, right,
So you know that's that's kind of the issue, is
that the people always pushing for this are probably like
(08:31):
the hyper literate, and they're not gonna push for something
that looks like it's not well.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
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 do
see this as kind of like there's something wrong with it.
But those are also the same people who have kind
(08:59):
of started initiatives in the past. So I don't know
what the deal is. I don't know if we're ever
going to do this to you.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
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 thcho,
which is how people do it on text now or
thhoe maybe, and then to say like I knowed that guy,
you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Yeah, No, I do know you mean.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Yeah, one's a little further I think than the other.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Well, so yeah, I'm not exactly how farther or 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, Yeah, So it just
died down for decades, and it wasn't until the seventies
that it came up again from a guy named Edward
(09:51):
ron Thaler, and he was the chairman of the American
Literacy Council. He not only saw a need to simplify
spelling for the sake that it could be simplified, he
traced the problem of having trouble learning English and a
literacy rates to dropping out of school and then turning
(10:13):
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 seventies to the nineties.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Yeah, and he thought, like, the 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.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Right, So, America seems to be doing pretty good. There's
a ninety nine percent 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 that
that just talks about basic literacy, like just being able
(11:04):
to read, like you can sound out words and read,
you understand the basic building blocks of English grammar. Ninety
nine percent of Americans know how to do that. But
when you talk about functional literacy, it drops precipitously.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Yeah, this number surprises me me too. Apparently twenty one
percent of Americans are functionally illiterate, which, yeah, that's that
seems high, but you know, if that's the stat that's
the stat.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
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.
Twenty one percent of Americans, by the way, equal seventy
one million people.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Yeah, that's a lot of folks. So yeah, 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.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Yeah for sure. Before we go, thank you very much
to History dot Com, Time, Paleo, Future, Smithsonian, Uh, and
the Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, who is takes this to me,
Oh god, when I was probably fifteen. We're finally getting
around to do it.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Shocking. Yeah, this is how many years later is that? Oh?
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Like Tony?
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Okay, great, Happy birthday.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Short stuff is out.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
You Know. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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