Gabe Henry on Enough Is Enuf – Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell

Sponsored by The Caxton Club.

There is no vaccine. It can strike anyone. The chief occupant of the White House. A famous author. A lexicographer. A steel magnate.

When it takes hold the mania begins to fester and then erupts in a messianic drive to invent a new communications method that will require everyone in the United States to unlearn something they’ve been taught (or not) since childhood.

Before it subsides it can bankrupt the infected. Expose them to public ridicule. And provide a barrel of laughs to all of us who read about it, hear about it, and watch from a safe distance.

It’s the contagion that Gabe Henry reveals in his exceptionally entertaining book, Enough Is Enuf – Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell (HarperCollins 2025). Henry, also editor of Eating Salad Drunk: Haikus for the Burnout Age by Comedy Greats, will tell the sad tale of how English was mixed in a great bowl into which was dropped Celtic, Latin, Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman and then seasoned by the whims of Wiliam Caxton. And about the Quixotic missions by the great and the obscure to rationalize it, as they are consumed by the thought, “If only everyone would just listen. My scheme makes so much sense.”

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