What Wred's Reading: Righting The Mother Tongue

I bought Righting The Mother Tongue:  From Olde English To Email, The Tangled Story Of English Spelling by David Wolman at a dollar a bag library sale.  Obviously, at such a sale, I am not very picky, so anything that looks slightly interesting gets tossed in the bag, but this is a pretty good book, especially given the price of four cents or whatever.  Basically, it's a journalist who read a bunch of David Crystal books and decided to write his own book about the English language.  To make his book stand out, he focused his history of the English language on spelling.  It has that breezy, only slightly intellectual feel that a lot of nonfiction books do these days, but it's a pleasant enough way to get a review of the history of the English language and how crazy people get about language use.