At the height of its power and influence in the 1930s, Colonel Robert R. McCormick's Chicago Tribune feared nothing. Not even the English language. With the help of a scholarly staffer named James O'Donnell Bennett, McCormick set out in the Trib to change Chicagoland's spelling habits. "Simplified spelling" made its debut on Jan. 28, 1934, and schoolteachers all over the Middle West found themselves fighting to save pupils from such Tribisms as hocky, fantom and definitly. Freighters became fraters and sheriffs sherifs. A Trib editorial proclaimed that there was "rime and reason for...
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