Spell It Out The Curious, Enthralling and Extraordinary Story of English Spelling

Good writing, as with the author's other books, but the subject is… quite aggravating. At times horrendously fascinating in its seemingly random convolutions, but it makes me feel for those learning English as a second language. The book is highly thorough, with chapters about new vowel sounds, new consonant sounds, old vowels for new purposes, etc etc—super interesting to see (and, inevitably, as with most things about vocabulary and spelling, to mouth or whisper) the many examples of etymological origin or historical change littered throughout, but it began to feel a bit fatiguing toward the end. Still, always here for some good linguistic descriptivism. Nor is staying with traditional attitudes towards spelling an option. We — everyone, not just teachers — need to change the way we think about it. We have to stop cursing it in solely negative terms — as a daunting barrier, as a hostile mountain, as an apparently perpetual process of rote learning — and start thinking of it as a voyage of exploration. On that forward-looking note, I found the final chapters about the Internet's potential influence on language and the future of English spelling quite thought-provoking. He gives pairs such as rhubarb → rubarb, recommend → recomend, and minuscule → miniscule as examples of misspellings on the Internet potentially becoming accepted variant spellings. For minuscule/miniscule, this is the usage note in the Oxford Dictionary: The standard spelling is minuscule rather than miniscule. The latter form is a very common one (accounting for almost half of citations for the term in the Oxford English Corpus), and has been recorded since the late 19th century. It arose by analogy with other words beginning with mini-, where the meaning is similarly ‘very small’. It is now so widely used that it can be considered as an acceptable variant, although it should be avoided in formal contexts. I think this is one of the themes of the book that I really enjoyed, the idea that language, especially one as open to foreign influences as English, is perpetually evolving. Perhaps the irregularity of English spelling sees some smoothing out over the course of history, as its users perceive existing patterns and warp language ever so slightly so it makes more sense to them, but foreign words and neologisms (most prominently, words introduced/influenced by technology) keep seeping in, and the river of linguistic variation narrows and widens thusly.