Righting the Mother Tongue
From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling
Chapter One
War of the Words
"There is no excuse, however, for ‘thru' for through from any point of view."
Benjamin Ide Wheeler, September 15, 19061
The students in Stanford University's "Calamity Class" of 1906 must have thought the world was falling apart. Five months before graduation, the Great Earthquake leveled much of San Francisco. More than 3,000 people perished, and the destruction and subsequent fires left some 225,000 residents homeless. Overseas, Italy's Mount Vesuvius had just erupted, again. Russia was recovering from a revolution and war with Japan. A tsunami in Hong Kong and earthquakes in Ecuador and India had killed tens of thousands of people.
The United States was not engaged in military conflict at the time, but the Spanish-American War was fresh in the collective memory. On the other side of the Atlantic, Europeans were planting the seeds of political foment that would lead to World War I, an ... read full excerpt from: Righting the Mother Tongue ebook
