David Crystal is a prolific author of books about the English language. […] Crystal’s latest offering […] is concerned with “the English linguistic heritage of Britain as encountered through the places which shaped it”. […] “Another day, another abbey,” he writes of his visit to Bourne in Lincolnshire. This was where the monk Orm produced the work known as the Ormulum, which is among other things the earliest extant example of an attempt at spelling reform.

Oxford professor Simon Horobin argues against spelling reform on the grounds that the complex and inconsistent detail of English spelling is “testimony to the richness of our linguistic heritage and a connection with our literary past”.

Horobin, an Oxford professor whose previous work has mainly been about Chaucer, […] does argue against spelling reform, on the grounds that the complex and inconsistent detail of English spelling is “testimony to the richness of our linguistic heritage and a connection with our literary past”.