Here's author David Wolman's own explanation of what this book is:
"This book is my journey into the past and future of English spelling. It's an everyman's review of how the words of our language acquired their current form, a study of the quest to change the spelling code, and an exploration of spelling convention and innovation in the digital age."
That sums it up pretty well. It's an everyman's book in the double sense that it's written by a nonexpert and is pitched at people who want an overview with interesting facts, ideas and illustrative detail but not extended scholarly analysis. The information is generally derived from authoritative sources, often books written by language scholars for a general audience. Explanations are lucid.
Emphasis should be given to "my journey," as a fair amount of the book revolves around Wolman's trips to places of significance in his take on the history and future of English spelling. He travels to several places in Britain where events such as the Norman Conquest and the English translation of the Bible occurred, takes a side trip to Germany and Belgium, homes of Gutenberg and the first English printed book, visits the home of famous American dictionary author Noah Webster, the Scripps National Spelling Bee, the home of Google in Silicon Valley, and other places along the way, usually accompanied by an expert who helps explain the significance of the events related to the places. It's like one of those BBC TV history specials without a camera crew.
His journey is also personal in the sense that he weaves in his own history with spelling, from a lifelong self-perception as a bad speller to his participation in a local spelling bee.
The narrative is leisurely and somewhat rambling, in a pleasant way, with frequent detours from one thread to another.
A major thread throughout the book concerns the controversy over how much emphasis should be put on proper spelling and what proper spelling should be understood to be. Should we care if a word is spelled unconventionally as long as we can easily understand it? Is it desirable or possible to reform spelling? Wolman seems to side with a laissez-faire approach, but he doesn't call for less emphasis on correct spelling in school or the like, so it isn't clear is he has a fully worked out position of his own.
Wolman finally considers reasons to worry about where spelling is headed but basically ends up at "the kids are all right." (I was hoping for some more robust tying up of ends about the controversies of spelling.)
The book is enjoyable and interesting, a fairly quick read.
Quibbles and ruminations inspired by the book
Wolman sees the importance of the spelling differences between words like 'desert' and 'dessert', but he doesn't see the significance of the differences between 'hare-brained' and 'hair-brained', or 'strait-jacket'/'strait-laced' and 'straight-jacket'/'straight-laced' (68). I think the differences in the latter cases are significant, as they convey different root images or ideas. Having the brain of a small animal is a different idea than having a brain with some quality related to hair (whether it be that hair is all there is in the head, or the thinness of a hair, or whatever). Both might naturally mean "stupid," but by different routes. Similarly, the idea of narrow or tight in 'strait' is very different than whatever might be conveyed by 'straight' in the examples given. ('Straight' actually works with 'straight-laced' but in its own distinctive way.)
Wolman suggests that spelling may change more quickly because of the internet, which is largely unedited. He cites in particular Google's enabling bad or alternative spelling with its "Did you mean ...?" search function. Things do change faster and and faster, and he may be right, but I think it could work more the other way, that bad spellers will now be reminded of correct spellings by Google, and by spellcheckers, which are more and more integrated into web-related applications, and have been improving my spelling, at least. I think these things may actually tend to slow the change of most spelling.
There are of course practical benefits to uniformity of spelling, which requires a common standard, but it feels like more is involved. Excuse the image, but I once had a very learned professor who said misspelling is like picking your nose in public, which I take to mean that it's a violation of manners. It is curious that we, or some of us, at least, do tend to feel about misspelling the way we might about holding our dinner fork with a fist while eating. But even if they're sometimes arbitrary, there is something to be said for having good manners about our forks and so on, and for drawing some limited inferences about people based their adherence to such niceties. They show something about our training and our willingness or ability to participate in social forms, rather like a dance we're all supposed to know the steps to and perform together. The steps may sometimes be arbitrary, but there's a grace in knowing them and doing them correctly.
