Online Author Talk | Gabe Henry : Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell

Have you ever wondered why the English spelling of words is sometimes… well… just weird? Come on a surprisingly hilarious journey with us and author Gabe Henry through the history of the English language, while we discuss troublemakers like Mark Twain who broke all the rules. In Enough is Enuf, Gabe Henry humorously traces the “simplified spelling movement” from medieval England to Revolutionary America, from the birth of standup comedy to contemporary pop music, and explores its lasting influence in words like color (without a U), plow (without -ugh), and the iconic ’90s ballad “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
Anyone who has the misfortune to write in English will, every now and then, struggle with its spelling. In our erratic system, choir and liar rhyme, daughter and laughter don’t, and somehow you and ewe can’t agree on a single letter. So why do we still use it? If our spelling is so inconsistent, why haven’t we tried to fix it?

In the comic annals of linguistic history, legions of rebel wordsmiths have died on the hill of spelling reform, risking their reputations to simplify English spelling. This book is about them: Mark Twain, Eliza Burnz, Noah Webster, Upton Sinclair, Emma Dearborn, Theodore Roosevelt, Benjamin Franklin, and the countless other “simplified spellers” who, for a time in their lives, became fanatic about writing kof instead of cough, tung for tongue, and fyzics for physics (and tried futilely to get everyone around them to do it too).
Register now for this informative and entertaining conversation to find out why Gabe Henry thinks UR not a bad speller, the English language is.

You can register for this free, live, online talk here.
This is one of a series of free, live-streamed author talks made possible through the Library’s partnership with Library Speakers Consortium (LSC). You can learn more about upcoming presentations on our LSC microsite, as well as watch recordings of presentations that you were unable to attend live.

About the Author: Gabe Henry is the author of three books including the poetry anthology Eating Salad Drunk, a humor collaboration with Jerry Seinfeld, Bob Odenkirk, Mike Birbiglia, Margaret Cho, and other titans of comedy. Eating Salad Drunk was featured in The New Yorker in February 2022 (“A Smattering of Haiku for the Burnout Age”) and ranked one of Vulture’s Best Comedy Books of 2022. Henry’s work has been published in TIME, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, the Weekly Humorist, US News & World Report, and more. He has spent more than a decade exploring the strange and forgotten history of simplified spelling, which, by his own admission, has only made him a worse speller. He lives and works in New York. Learn more at www.gabehenry.com.