Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff.
I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and there's Jerry, and Dave's here in spirit, and this is Short Stuff, which should be spelled exactly like it's spelled right now.
Chapter 2: What challenges does the English language present to learners?
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 is no 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?
Yeah.
Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, William James, the father of psychology, an 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 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.
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Chapter 3: Who were the prominent figures supporting the simplified spelling movement?
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 just doesn't seem to be any 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 which are going to 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 how difficult it is to remember all this stuff in spelling the English language.
Yeah, although, to be fair, they're not spelling things like draft, you know?
No, no. They're spelling anti-disestablishmentarianism.
Yeah, I think that one's not too hard, actually.
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Chapter 4: What was Teddy Roosevelt's role in the simplified spelling initiative?
F-Y-S-H-E 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 O-U like they do in the UK or Canada or Australia. Or we don't spell program with an extra M-E at the end because at some point the 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?
No, but we do have to wait a very short time while we take a break. And then short stuff will be right back.
Chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk. Bye. Bye.
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 going to spell no, K-N-O-W, the way that it should be spelled, N-O-E. In the present tense, like I know Chuck is great. But instead of new, K-N-E-W for past tense, we're going to say node. Like I've always knowed that Chuck is great.
Yeah. So, you know, therein 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 kind of the issue is that the people always pushing for this are probably like the hyper literate and they're not going to push for something that looks like it's not.
Right.
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Chapter 5: How did public perception affect Roosevelt's spelling reform efforts?
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, T-H-O, which is how people do it on text now, or T-H-O-E maybe. And then to say, like, I knowed that guy. You know what I mean?
Yeah, no, I do know what you mean.
Yeah, one's a little further, I think, than the other.
So, yeah, I'm not exactly how far they were 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 Ronthaler.
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 and illiteracy 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, Chuck, 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.
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