From 1972 to 1975, the Australian government informally had a Ministry of Helth.

H E L T H.

Why? Spelling reform.

Every so often, someone has a bright idea to reform English spelling.

There's an old joke from an unknown reformer about how " fish "

can be spelled " ghoti " and still be consistent with English.

Obviously, it can't, because any fluent English speaker would pronounce it " ghoti ",

but that doesn't help anyone learning the language.

And you 're probably thinking that I'm about to go off on a rant

about how spelling reform never works,

and that prescriptivists are doomed to failure.

The trouble is... sometimes, just sometimes, it does work.

Spelling in English used to be a mess.

Okay, it still is a mess, but it was a mess that no one could agree on.

Shakespeare signed his name several different ways,

and we just happened to settle on the current one in the last century.

In 1920, Andrew Carnegie 's Simplified Spelling Board,

an organization with a surprising amount of money behind it,

released the " Handbook of Simplified Spelling ".

It 's been scanned and is available online, and it's worth having a quick look through.

It 's written in simplified spelling, which does tend to get a bit confusing.

But it does make a really good point.

If we were designing a language from the ground up,

and heaven knows, people have tried,

you would design it with a simple method of spelling.

There are natural languages out there which are more or less consistent.

While most of the Spelling Board 's suggestions withered on the vine, some did survive.

They're the reason that American English spells " mould " without a " u ".

Indeed, a lot of American versus British differences are the remnants

of attempted spelling reforms throughout the years.

" Color " and " center " are spelled differently in the US

because Mr. Noah Webster just decided they should be...

and he happened to be writing the dictionary.

There's even the more extreme suggestion of throwing out the current alphabet altogether :

playwright George Bernard Shaw invented a new alphabet,

which was eventually refined into something called Quikscript.

It's actually a rather elegant alphabet, but, well, good luck converting people to that.

When we 're trained from birth to understand one set of squiggles,

and reinforce that training constantly every day,

it's strangely difficult to shift to another set of squiggles.

What we do tend to see is the slow adoption of new spellings.

" Miniscule ", with two " i 's ", used to be an incorrect spelling.

Now it's a variant.

" To-day " used to be hyphenated, as did " wire-less " and " e-mail ".

And the Associated Press Style Guide only switched from " Web site " to " website " in 2010.

But just imposing spelling reform from on high doesn't generally work.

Particularly not now, and particularly given how many accents of English there are.

Would you say resistance is futile, with an " e "?

Or futil, without?

In regular speech, a lot of Americans would say fudil,

voicing the " t " to turn it into a " d ".

How do you spell that?

And more to the point : how do you get everyone to agree to it?

For crying out loud, America has n't even shifted to the metric system yet,

and Britain still... has a monarchy.

That got away from me.

So, anyway, next time that someone says they don't know

whether " judgment " has an " e " in the middle of it?

Tell them it doesn't matter.

Because in those cases?

It really doesn't.