When Enough Is Enuf

A friend of mine once set out to learn Esperanto, the presumptive world language whose adoption, it was often claimed, would usher in a new age of understanding and harmony. He mastered the rudiments and then set off for a week of immersion at the World Esperanto Congress, in Beijing. I'm pretty sure that he never intended to make a full leap of commitment -- it was more a linguistic version of adventure camp -- but for a few months his greetings consisted of a cheery Bonan matenon ("Good morning") or Kiel fartas aferoj? ("How are things going?"). He also learned to say Mi bezonas tradukiston ("I need an interpreter"), perhaps the most useless phrase in Esperanto.

The notion that by reforming the way people employ language you can reform almost everything else is a durable canard that has survived a thousand years of contrary evidence. Concoct a mental image of language utopians and you'll likely summon a stereotype of busy eccentrics. And you wouldn't be far wrong. But their ranks have also included stalwarts like Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie and George Bernard Shaw.

In his breezy "Righting the Mother Tongue," David Wolman takes up the story of one particular subset: the spelling reformers. I use the word "breezy" advisedly. This is not some leaden academic tome but an intellectual travelogue across the centuries that also ranges geographically from the Litchfield haunts of Dr. Johnson, creator of the first great English dictionary, to the Silicon Valley home of Les Earnest, the progenitor of computerized spell-checking.

The trouble with English orthography starts with a simple mathematical fact: the language has 44 distinct sounds but only 26 letters to express them. Letters have to double up (and triple and quadruple up). Add to this a mongrel pedigree and a knack for absorbing new words from all over the world and you have an unruly language that cries out for housekeeping. As early as 1549 an English lawyer named John Hart was complaining about the orthographical contamination of "our inglish toung." Twain described the English alphabet as "invented by a drunken thief." Shaw famously argued that the word fish should be spelled ghoti -- from the "gh" in cough, the "o" in women, and the "ti" in nation. In his will, Shaw left a small bequest for the winner of a competition to devise a new English alphabet.

Mr. Wolman fills his book with memorable portraits. There's Bartlomiej Beniowski, a Polish expatriate living in London. "Britons," he wrote in a stirring manifesto, self-published (of course) in 1844, "alter your alphabet -- alter your orthography -- make your language easy -- speak to the world." In the 1850s Brigham Young endorsed a 38-letter Deseret Alphabet, which dispensed with the traditional 26 letters altogether and employed a set of new symbols resembling Ceylonese or Coptic. The hope, said Young, was that "the years that are now required to learn to read and spell can now be devoted to other studies." Even Mormons weren't up to the challenge.

Noah Webster had better luck. The ardent lexicographer and nationalist succeeded in ridding American English of the "u" in words like rancour and humour -- spellings, as it happens, that had been introduced in a previous fit of improvement. Webster also won battles against silent or unnecessary letters, like the "k" in publick and the second "l" in travelled. Ironically, he lived out his days in Amherst, Mass., a town whose name is properly pronounced with a silent "h." Another child of Amherst (the college) was Melville -- later Melvil -- Dewey, a hyper-organized young man whose reformist impulses encompassed the metric system and book cataloging. Colonic irrigation was probably in there somewhere. Determined to lead Americans out of their "orthografic swamp," Dewey created his own spelling regime and enlisted Andrew Carnegie to support the efforts of a crusading organization, the Simplified Spelling Board. For decades Carnegie wrote the board a check every year for $25,000.

Dewey's influence reached its zenith in August 1906, when Theodore Roosevelt, a sympathizer, issued an order directing the Government Printing Office to adopt new spellings for some 300 words -- for instance, prest, dasht, nite, thoro and good-by. The outcry was immediate and intense. Rusevelt, as one newspaper began referring to him, said that he saw no harm in "the concentration of powers in one man's hands"; but spelling reform, as another paper editorialized, was just "2 mutch." Legislation moved quickly through Congress to countermand this act of executive overreach. Roosevelt withdrew his order.

The Simplified Spelling Board never recovered. The attention trained on its alliance of dotty enthusiasts and academic grandees attracted the ridicule of critics like H.L. Mencken. Dewey himself admitted that his ranks were dwindling: "There ar so fu ov us that ar foloin this thin up thoroli that we must kip in close tuch." In 1917 Carnegie wrote his last check to the group. "I think I have been patient long enuf," he explained.

In the past century spelling reform has lagged some distance behind global warming, human rights and Maglev trains as an urgent priority. The competition for the Shaw Alphabet was held in 1958 -- the winner was a 48-letter system that resembles dancing chromosomes. As Mr. Wolman notes, the biggest influence on modern spelling is the Internet, whose impact cuts both ways. Whether the centrifugal forces of texting ("Thx 4 ur thots!") are balanced by the centripetal forces of spell-checking remains to be seen. Spell-check is a rag-tag militia, as this quatrain suggests: "Eye strike the quays and type a word / And weight four it two say / Weather eye am write or wrong / It tells me straight a weigh."

In the end the debates over spelling are skirmishes in the larger war between those who seek to impose lasting order on the way we write and speak and those who believe such efforts to be futile. Most of us keep a foot in each camp, knowing that language both demands regulation and defies control -- much as, to take an analogy from physics, we live tidy Newtonian lives in a bizarre quantum universe. It's a serviceable enough contradiction, and what choice do we have? But I doubt we've seen the last of visionaries who refuse to accept it. Dasht hopes lie ahead.

Mr. Murphy, the editor at large of Vanity Fair, is the author, most recently, of "Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America."