Righting The Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling

Author:
David Wolman
Publisher:
Smithsonian Books
Reviewed in:
Winter 2008-09
Category:

Oregon freelance Wolman — a confessed weak speller himself — takes us on a journey into the past origins of the language and looks at the future of English as influenced by the digital age. Renaissance, millennium, diarrhea, camaraderies, feign, labyrinth, misspelling — are you able to spell them without a mistake? [Right now, this columnist is dealing with the harmonization or harmonisation of the European