From 1972 to 1975, the Australian government informally had a Ministry of Helth.
H-E-L-T-H.
Why?
Spelling reform.
Every so often, someone has a brilliant idea to reform English spelling.
There's an old joke from an unknown reformer about how fish can be spelled ghoti and still be consistent with English.
Obviously, it can't, because any fluent English speaker would pronounce it ghoti, but that doesn't help anyone learning the language.
And you're probably thinking that I'm about to go off on a rant about how spelling reform never works, and that prescriptivists are doomed to failure.
The trouble is... sometimes, just sometimes, it does work.
Spelling in English used to be a mess.
