The Great Failure of Andrew Carnegie’s Simplified Spelling Lobby

In their own quiet way, spelling and grammar are each forms of lobbying. We treat language as an immutable fact, but it started out as a variety of opinions on what things should be called. And those opinions, like a diamond pressed into form, slowly molded into a definitive shape. But even though language started from dissent, there’s a limit to how much dissent we can tolerate... By Ernie Smith.