Enough is Enuf

This was such a delightful little history. I don't think anyone would disagree that the written English language needs a makeover. Sadly, every attempt to make this happen over the last few centuries has only added more inconsistent and nonsensical rules. I loved learning about Caxton's and his Flemish assistant's influences on English (thanks a lot for the silent Es and Gs). I learned some fun new-to-me Chicago history about McCormick, the Trib, and the White Sox, I didn't see that coming when I pickedup this book! And it re-inforced this feeling that I often get when reading history books, that when one single influential guy gets a hang up about something, he inevitably makes it everybody else's problem too. Lookin' at you Sir James Pitman, Noah Webster, and Benjamin Franklin. Highly recommend.

 Gabe Henry's book can be repetitive as after all a lot of people tried to do basically the same thing, but it also underlines that there is a strong link between comedy and spelling reform - Gabe is a comedian himself so there may be a bias, but the link is there e.g. the Phunny Phellows, who included Mark Twain, and who Gabe suggests were the first ever stand-up comics. 

Why spelling reformers would want to abolish j I don't know. J is almost a counter-example to the 'no fixed sound for a letter' rule - it has basically one sound (with a few, usually loan-word, exceptions) throughout its uses.

I'm intrigued by SoundSpel which is maybe the best one I've seen. It was championed by "Uncle" Ed Rondthaler (1904-2009 and yes that is correct.) and is fairly close to my proposed new spelling (PNS) of a while back. It lacks a few things e.g. both voiced and unvoiced th are written [th], and both c and k represent /k/. Q for /kw/ is a nice touch and more real-world than PNS, where qu becomes cw as in [cween] and q is the /x/ sound in loch. PNS doesn't have k except in loanwords like kilometre. Its vowel pairs are consistent, not IPA-strict. SoundSpel does use doubled vowels (aa, ee etc) which PNS does also.

'plow' may be American but to me it also looks more rural (despite a local pub - in the heart of the nearby village - being called The Plough).
SoundSpel is described as 'American Spelling,' being an example of one subset of modified spelling, that is, the wish to move away from a British-dominated language. The US is independent, they say, and should have its own language, or at least its own spelling. Webster made a start, but a small one. 
One of its proponents was Dewey, creator of the decimal system of that name. He failed to radicalise orthography but he does seem to have, as a by-product, invented winter sports as an American pastime (previously it had just been in Europe; he put Lake Placid on the map). 

Starts in the Middle Ages when spelling wasn't really a thing and ends in the near-present with txtspk. For some reason mentions that CS Lewis was born in Ireland but evades that George Bernard Shaw was actually Irish and didn't think much of the English's ability to speak their own language (I once argued, unfortunately, that minority languages didn't matter, based on Irish English having become a major literary tongue). Nicely mentions Slade and their apparently 17 consecutive hits with 'humorous' misspelings (Cum on Feel the Noize, Gudbuy t'Jane, Mama we're all krazy now etc.). 
Not as long as you think because a lot of it is notes and references.