In this Grammarpalooza bonus, Gabe Henry talks about what it was like to research, write, and edit "Enough Is Enuf"—a book overflowing with deliberate misspellings. From honoring quirky spelling reformers to working with his very patient copy editor, Gabe gives credit where credit is due. Plus, we get his book recommendations.
In this Grammarpalooza bonus, Gabe Henry talks about what it was like to research, write, and edit "Enough Is Enuf"—a book overflowing with deliberate misspellings. From honoring quirky spelling reformers to working with his very patient copy editor, Gabe gives credit where credit is due. Plus, we get his book recommendations.
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Mignon
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Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and I am here with Gabe Henry, who wrote this fantastic book, "Enough Is Enuf," about simplified spelling. If you listened to the main episode, you heard all the fascinating things from inside the book. But I really want to hear how the book got made in this bonus episode. So, Gabe, thanks again for being here.
Gabe
Thanks again for having me.
Mignon
Yeah. So, you know, I feel like at this point … you reading this book, you must have done so much research. I feel like you must be one of the world experts on simplified spelling at this point. And I'm curious how you got started down this path.
Gabe
This path goes way back to one day in college, one lesson by one teacher who talked about simplified spelling for about five minutes. And those five minutes stuck with me for decades. Well, not too many decades, but a couple decades.
Mignon
You're not an old man. (laughing)
Gabe
No, not yet. But yeah, those five minutes inspired me so much. And I kept the idea on the back burner in my brain for all these years. I went through other books, other projects, but I knew that this was always gonna be the book that I'm meant to write. Because it's my tone, my point of view, my sense of humor seems to just be the perfect voice for it. And for all these years that I didn't write it, I felt a lot of anxiety that someone else was gonna write it first and better.
Mignon
Mmm, yeah.
Gabe
Bill Bryson was gonna find it or something, and then there goes my book. Luckily, it didn't, and when you're writing a long book, you have to wait for the right time in your life for that space to open up. You do need two years of concentration, or two years of financial support, two years of solitary opportunities to do this stuff. It's hard. And I think it was around when COVID happened or right after, this space started to open up for me. And that's when I just took the time and decided this is the time of my life. This might be the last opportunity. So it's been a couple of few years since then.
Mignon
Yeah, you're right. Actually, when I opened it, I thought, why has nobody written this book before? I mean, it did. Once I was aware of it, I was like, of course someone would write this book. It's such an interesting topic. Yeah. So, I imagine you traveling to archives and things like that to write this book. Did you actually do that?
Gabe
I had help in the beginning from librarians at the New York Historical Society. I used to work there. They did some research for me. I took out or I read through some of the archives there. Went through a lot of digital archives. Obviously, that's a great resource. Newspaper archives, there are some incredible archives that you pay a subscription for and you can read through a random Oklahoma local newspaper from 1932, and you read through everything. And then, of course, I was buying and taking out books from the libraries. I've started, I think just unconsciously, started a little bit of an old dictionary collection. So now I'm a collector, and I don't know how that happened, but I've got about a lot of old books that are falling apart when I try to pick them up.
Mignon
Were there points where you felt like maybe you were stuck?
Gabe
That's a great question. I never felt stuck. I felt the typical self-doubt in terms of how relevant this topic is gonna be and in terms of how, my own ability to really do it justice. I never felt stuck like I didn't know what to write next because I had done so much research; I had outlined so much of the book. I always knew what the next part of the outline was to get to, but I put so much pressure on myself to make sure that each era connected and that the narrative was clear that I think I had some severe moments of blockage as a writer just from the sheer importance I put onto myself and the book. I just wanted to do these reformers justice, and I wanted to do it in the right tone, in the right style, just the right angle. I definitely overthought it, is what I'm trying to say.
Mignon
Yeah. No, you absolutely did do a good job, though. It hangs together so well over the time period involved and everything from Samuel Johnson to Prince and his simplified song lyrics and album titles and things like that. How about -- you say, would anyone care? It seemed like one of the things you were wondering is, would anyone care? I mean, was it easy to sell the book idea? Did you find a publisher right away or were you working at that for a while?
Gabe
Yeah, I guess it wasn't that hard to sell. It felt like forever, but it was, the book had been pitched for a couple months before we got a bite. It fell into the right hands with the right editor, Day Street, HarperCollins; they fell in love with it. And it was this perfect match. When we had our first meeting with them, they were so enthusiastic, I was so enthusiastic, and we just knew that it was gonna work out. So I think that what I originally envisioned this book to be was kind of more of a loose collection of these various proposals over the years, like a collection without a narrative, without an arc. But the more I did the research, the more I saw very clearly the arc of … this centuries-long arc of futility and failure and eccentric characters and bright ideas and big systems. And I saw it going somewhere. I really did see it start going like this and that it peaked in this internet age that we're living in.
I saw this as the … just the lineage. It was ending up here and the irony, the twist that for hundreds of years, these reformers tried to push simplified spelling to no avail. And then when left alone, the language naturally simplified to meet the needs of our fast-paced interconnected world.
Mignon
Do you think the pace is going to continue to be fast, or do you think it's going to slow down again?
Gabe
The pace of our language and our world?
Mignon
Yeah, the pace of language change. I think we would probably both agree that spelling is going to continue to get simpler over time. I mean, that's sort of always the direction it goes. And it seems like it's sped up lately because of, as you know, the technology and internet and texting and all that.
But now we're in a new position; do you think it's going to keep going fast, or do you think it might slow down again?
Gabe
What I've seen researching this book is that every period of reform where it seems like it's going successfully inevitably has a backlash. And I think that we've been living in this world of internet language for 25 years, maybe 30. And I think that on the other side, there might be a little bit of a backlash; it might be a little bit of a two steps forward, one step back thing. I do know that spelling reformers—the ones that exist now, the simplified spelling movement, what's left of it—they do see text speak and digital language as promising, as hopeful for the future of overall formal changes in our language. So I think that as long as we keep using our shorter digital shortcuts with each other on an informal basis, we're all kind of voting for this simpler way of doing things. And then, accumulated over time, over centuries, I think that does push us pretty steadily into a direction where we'll be spelling differently in a few hundred years, just the same way that Shakespeare was spelling differently from us now.
Mignon
Mm-hm. And actually, the reason I asked you about publishing before is, as someone who has published books myself, as I was reading this book, I was very frequently thinking about the copy editing process. And the poor copy editor—well, first of all, you trying to write it, did you have to turn your spell checker off to be able to write this book? I mean, otherwise, half of everything would be underlined.
Gabe
I should have turned it off because the manuscript just became red squiggles everywhere you look. It didn't bother me as much as it clearly bothered the copy editor. I don't covet that job because her job is to obviously catch things that I missed. But in a given paragraph where I have eight intentional misspellings, how is she going to know that I have—whether I have seven intentional ones and one unintentional one, or whether I have five intentional and three unintentional? She definitely had to do a lot of work to get into my brain and understand in the context of each sentence, what is on purpose and what isn't. But I will say even worse than her job was when we had to make the audiobook.
Because so much of misspelling and simplified spelling is visual, and relaying that in an audio format, we had to rewrite—in a way, we had to rewrite the whole book. At least we had to recast it in this way that would lend itself to audio recitation rather than continually—because continually spelling something for the listener gets very monotonous very quickly.
Mignon
Yeah, yeah, how did you actually do that? Beause you didn't spell every word, did you?
Gabe
No, we—so I went page by page in the manuscript, sentence by sentence, and where it made sense to spell out a word, like if it's a three-letter word or a four-letter word, we spelled it out. But if we're talking about a 10-letter word where some reformer in 1806 re-spelled the word "association" with three S's and two Z's, and like, and it's 12 letters long, you couldn't spell that out because you have to have some respect for the listener and their ears. No one wants to hear that. So we had to get creative in how we spelled out the long words. We might say something like "cartography" spelled with a K and ending in an FY. So instead of spelling the whole word out, we would give examples within the word of, you know, that hard C becomes a K and that PH at the end becomes an F. So we had to do a lot of explaining, and it took going through the whole manuscript and highlighting all these areas that the audiobook narrator would have to focus on and just make sure that it read enjoyably and not tediously.
Mignon
Yeah, that is a lot of extra work. And for people who may not realize, it's also incredibly unusual; usually, the philosophy for audiobooks is they need to be exactly the same as a print book. They're pretty dogmatic about that, to the point where they will read long lists of things that might be boring and things like that. So yeah, that's interesting that they recognize the need to do that.
Gabe
Have you done audiobooks as well?
Mignon
Yeah, yeah, I have. It's really fun. Obviously, I'm a podcaster, so I like to record.
Gabe
Yeah, yeah.
Mignon
Okay. So, can we name your copy editor? I feel like she deserves some extra credit.
Gabe
Sure. Wonderful, wonderful copy editor named Rachel Myers. God bless her.
Mignon
Rachel, good job. Kudos. You deserve—I don't know, go put your feet up and have a really nice mug of something you enjoy because this must have been a heroic effort.
Gabe
Yes, thank you, Rachel.
Mignon
Wonderful. So actually, and let's move on to what has become my favorite part of the podcast these days—your book recommendations. So help me and our listeners add to our to-be-read pile. What are some books that you have loved lately, Gabe?
Gabe
Can I hold them up as I talk?
Mignon
Yeah, please do. For the YouTube audience.
Gabe
All right. So first recommendation, and I'm sure your audience knows this already, "Because Internet" by Gretchen McCullough. I think that Gretchen's the best right now at describing how the internet changes how we write, and how we speak, and how we connect with each other. And she talks a lot about slang … of course, you have it right in your yellow section.
Mignon
Excellent book.
Gabe
She talks about digital communication and how it makes our language more expressive. And for the final chapter of my book, I relied on her quite a bit and her insights and her research. So definitely a huge recommendation to Gretchen.
Mignon
Yeah, great book.
Gabe
All right, now we're getting a little bit more distant from my particular domain. Mark Kurlansky, probably one of my favorite nonfiction historical authors. He's one of these guys that writes these broad histories through the lens of something very small and narrow. It's often to do with food. So he wrote a book on a whole world history through the lens of salt, a whole world history through the lens of milk, and this is a history of New York City through oysters and the rise and fall of oyster beds and the fishing industry and restaurant culture. And I learned so much from this book about where I'm from—New York. For instance, one funny tidbit, I learned why New Jersey and Staten Island are always at odds politically. And it's historically they shared, they had to fight over oyster beds. And they've just had that animosity is just endured.
Mignon
Oh, that's amazing. I'm going to get that book for my dad. He would love that.
Gabe
And then last one. This is a childhood favorite. I think I get most of my humor from my dad and from this book, "James Thurber: My Life and Hard Times."
Mignon
Oh, I don't know that one.
Gabe
As you can see, it's falling apart. This is from the '50s, and this is one of the funniest, most charming memoirs I've ever read. It's a series of brief, absurd short stories by James Thurber, who is this big humorist and cartoonist for "The New Yorker"—one of their first ones. And it's about his childhood growing up in Ohio. And I think if Larry David grew up in Ohio and was a Gentile, he would be James Thurber. So this is, this is my guy.
Mignon
That's wonderful. I think people are really going to enjoy those. Well, Gabe, Gabe Henry, author of "Enough is Enuf," a book that I really enjoyed. Gabe, thank you so much for being here. Where can people find you?
Gabe
GabeHenry.com or on Instagram, Gabe.Henry.
Mignon
Great. Thanks so much.
Gabe
Thank you so much.