Gabe Henry
speaker
42 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Gabe Henry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Right. This trend came about in the early 20th century. And it came right after Theodore Roosevelt stuck his hand into the simplified spelling movement.
So in 1906, he came out publicly and as a proponent of simplified spelling, and he made some efforts in his political circles to change the way his Oval Office and the federal government would spell in their correspondences and their communications. And his efforts lasted about three months. He was eventually mocked. And what it did, incidentally, was it raised the profile of simplified spelling.
It boosted its visibility in the pop culture. And little by little, simplified spelling began seeping into the pop culture. And this was particularly prominent in advertising. So in the 1920s, you get brands such as Kool-Aid with a K, Kleenex with a K, Krispy Kreme. And there was a name for this trend that was coined by one linguist in the 20s.
She called it the craze for K. And she blamed this directly on the simplified spelling movement, which had been pushing words like character with a K and chorus with a K since the days of Noah Webster.
Right. There are reasons that people have proposed for this. One is that K doesn't begin many words naturally in the English language. And often when it does begin a word, it's silent. So there's a novelty to seeing K begin a hard C word. So it catches your eye a little bit. it draws your attention to that aisle in the supermarket, the snack foods, the the Krispy Kremes, the Kit Kat bars.
And then there's another possibility, which is that anyone who has dabbled in comedy or humor knows that K is an inherently funny sound. It's considered to be to have some quality about it that is just funny to the ear.
Well, we are living in the digital world, and the digital world moves fast. And generally speaking, the internet breeds shorter and quicker content, shorter and quicker communication, just to meet our pace of life. And historically, a lot of these simplified spellers had the same motive. Efficiency, speed, a more direct... one-to-one correspondence, more direct one-to-one communication.
If you can shorten that time it takes to communicate an idea to someone, that's probably the best, most efficient form to communicate with them. So a lot of the simplifications we see today in texting and in social media, words like though spelled T-H-O, through spelled T-H-R-U, these were initially proposed hundreds of years ago.
and the irony is that these words never caught on when it was some kind of elite class imposing it upon the population but when it came from the bottom up when it came from texters and social media users and people typing it out with their thumbs for an informal conversation these did start to catch on so
In a way, the simplified spelling movement has these downstream effects in today's world, but the difference is no one is trying to turn it into the authoritative way of spelling, the way that those reformers tried to do.
Every generation has had these gatekeepers, these language purists, and they tend to see simplified spelling or texting shorthand as some loss of tradition or maybe the downfall of English as we know it. They're the purists that try to hold the language in its place. And then there are
the people who look at these changes and they see it as a natural evolution, a kind of reflection of how language tends to bend toward that natural simplification that takes place when you have a more interconnected, fast-paced society. I tend to fall into that latter category.
It does. And the reason it seems that way to us is because we have authoritative dictionaries. We have Webster's, we have Oxford English Dictionary. But these dictionaries are adding new words all the time, new spellings. OMG and LOL are now in these dictionaries, other digital additions like binge watch and selfie. And you're right that we see mostly additions of words and not
Respellings of words, but I think over time what these dictionaries are trying to do is reflect language as it exists in its current state and as long as
spelling continues to simplify in our informal communication i think that these uh language authorities will try to reflect that and i think you just have to look at the long the long arc of it the long timeline 200 years from now i would probably be surprised if we're spelling in the same exact way we're spelling now i would tend to think that it will become simpler and shorter.
These are actually the only remnants of successful spelling reform. These come directly from Noah Webster. So Noah Webster had tried to push these radical extreme reforms in 1789. And these are words, like I mentioned, laugh, L-A-F, love, L-U-V. He even had the word tongue spelled T-U-N-G. And they all failed. he realized that they weren't going to work in a practical way.
So 20 years later, as he's putting together his Webster's Dictionary, instead of pushing for these extreme reforms, he selectively incorporated some of his earlier simplifications, words like color and honor without the U, or plow and draft spelled without the British GH, which it continues to use today.
And once his dictionary became widely used, these spellings gained legitimacy and ultimately shaped American English as we know it today.
The word donut really came about in the early 20th century, 1920s, 1930s push for simplified spelling in advertising, which was really just a way to catch the eye. And Dunkin' Donuts
one of the first large national chains to use that spelling d-o-n-u-t rather than the way more complicated d-o-u-g-h-n-u-t it caught on from there so that's an example of where advertising is influenced by the pop culture and then in turn influences the pop culture
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