Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling Book

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

I originally picked this up because of a hugely entertaining interview with the author I heard on public radio's "The World in Words;" and blessedly, the book turns out to be just as entertaining, a brisk yet informative look at the various attempts over the millennia to standardize what we know as the English language. Because that of course is an important thing to know about English, for those who don't; that unlike, say, France, there is no official governing board for standard English usage, deciding with legal authority what is "proper" use of the language and what isn't, which is the main reason that English is both one of the most difficult languages on the planet to learn and one of the most expressive. But Lord, as Wolman so eloquently describes, there sure have been a lot of people who have tried their damnedest to impose a sense of official order over the language: from Chaucer and his cohorts in the Middle Ages to Webster and the other proto-linguists of the Enlightenment, to the surprisingly high-profile series of reformers during the Victorian and Edwardian eras (including Theodore Roosevelt, Dale Carnegie and Mark Twain) who spent millions of dollars trying to reduce the language down to a level more akin to modern text-messenging, all the way to the modern crackpots who "picket" the National Spelling Bee each year in order to garner more awareness for their cause. As you can imagine, then, there are a whole series of fascinating side-lanes along this path to modern English, which Wolman puts to very good use in his book, making it not just a dry history but a modern travel guide as well, as he journeys from the birthplace of standardized English (southwest England, that is), to the birthplace of printed text (Germany), to the first global headquarters of printed English books (Antwerp, surprisingly enough), peppering his text throughout with looks at all the various bizarre exceptions found in English spelling and why those exceptions exist. (Why does 'rhubarb' have a silent H? Why is 'color' spelled with an extra U in England but not the US?) It's one of the better nonfiction reads I've come across in a long time, and it comes highly recommended today.

Out of 10: 9.4