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Library Speakers Consortium Presents

Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell

Join us for a virtual event with "simplified spelling" historian and author Gabe Henry. Come on a surprisingly hilarious journey journey through the history of the English language.

Join us for an informative and entertaining virtual event with "simplified spelling" historian and author Gabe Henry. Find out why Henry thinks UR not a bad speller, the English language is. 

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. 

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. Henry's book Enough is Enuf 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).

In Enough is Enuf, 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.” Finally, Henry brings us to the digital age, where the swift pace of online exchanges now pushes us all 2ward simplification. 

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. 

Sponsored by the Friends of the Library.

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