Why some spelling reforms fail and others succeed

This week on the BBC Radio show Fry's English Delight, the topic was spelling.  (You can listen to the episode until next Monday. Also, thanks to the Virtual Linguist for the heads up on her blog.) We like to think of English spelling as absurd and unruly. But it wasn't always this way: When it was first written down, English enjoyed an almost one-to-on…