If you’ve ever wept over “Wednesday” or raged against the tyranny of “colonel,” Gabe Henry is your kind of nerd. The poet-comedian-historian—best known for Eating Salad Drunk, his haiku collection with contributions from Jerry Seinfeld, Mike Birbiglia, and other sharp wits—has turned his comic lens on one of the most tragicomic disasters of Western civilization: English spelling.
Henry will present his latest book, Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell, as part of Nerd Nite Hudson Valley on Friday, August 18 at the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon. It’s the ideal venue for a crash course in linguistic absurdity, delivered with a smirk and a sigh.
Enough Is Enuf is a romp through the graveyard of spelling reform movements, tracing the efforts of language crusaders both noble and deluded—from Ben Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt to obscure but passionate eccentrics like August Augustin, a 19th-century reformer who proposed replacing all vowels with numbers.
“He drew up this three by three grid numbered one through nine, and for each number, he gave a corresponding vowel sound,” says Henry. “So the number one corresponded to the sound of view as in view. So if you wanted to spell a word like view, you’d spell it ‘V1’. And then he had nine more numbers for all these nuanced vowels, and he translated biblical texts in this new spelling and reading through it was just one of the most enjoyable experiences because of how absurd it looked to me.”
These are the kinds of people who populate Henry’s pages: obsessive tinkerers, utopian misfits, half-mad geniuses who believed that by writing “enuf” instead of “enough,” they could usher in an age of rational communication. Spoiler: They could not.
Among the reformers, none loomed larger—figuratively and literally—than Teddy Roosevelt. In 1906, Roosevelt ordered the US Government Printing Office to start using simplified spellings in official documents: “thru,” “tho,” “kist,” and the like. “The reaction was a huge backlash in the press,” says Henry. “The press took him to task the press wrote these exaggerated phonetic headlines, parodies, satires, they tore ’em apart in political cartoons.”
Despite the laughs, Enough Is Enuf isn’t just a roast of failed reforms. It’s also a love letter to the beautiful mess of language and an exploration of how writing shapes access, power, and identity. Henry charts the link between simplified spelling and social movements: how abolitionists promoted phonetic writing to boost literacy among newly freed Black Americans, how suffragists taught shorthand as both a job skill and a feminist tool, how admen in the 1920s weaponized spelling for branding—Kool-Aid, Krispy Kreme, and Kit Kat.
And then there’s texting. “The book is a eulogy with a hopeful future. All these reformers, despite all their centuries of failures—their legacy will be successful because the natural direction the language will go in is a little bit closer to the simplifications they wanted,” says Henry. “So just a simple word like through spelled thru—Noah Webster proposed that in 1789, and it’s on every highway sign when you’re driving down the highway. And then in the informal usages of words, the single letter U, the words like tho, I mean, my own dad uses those single letter U all the time. So it’s not generation specific either.”
This is where Henry shines—not just as a researcher, but as a comic cultural critic. He’s a master of the punchline tucked inside a footnote, the eyebrow raised at history’s strangest detours.
“I don’t think that the top-down approach to spelling reform really works,” says Henry. “What we’re seeing today and how digital shorthand and digital communication is kind of naturally pushing us in a direction of simplification. I think that in the long run, that creates more lasting change. In the long arc of language, it will naturally bend toward simplicity. But these reformers were kind of trying to artificially push it into the future. That’s as impractical as trying to artificially pull it back into the past. It should be left to do what it’s going to do. It’s like gene selection or artificial evolution. Evolution happens with mutations and accidents over long periods of time. And I think it’s the same with language.”
So if you’ve ever wondered why “g” sounds different in “goose” and “genre,” or if you’ve lost a spelling bee on “daiquiri” and still haven’t recovered, Enough Is Enuf is your salve. And Gabe Henry is your guy.
