Thanks to the person at the MTP who responded to my Quayle query. I think Hirst's source is much sounder than the one I had in mind, which was a speech Twain made about Carnegie's simplified spelling scheme. Twain's point in that speech was that we didn't need to rationalize spelling so much as we needed to reform the alphabet so that it would reflect the diversity of the human voice in all of its variant languages and dialects. My regret is that Quayle's delight in variant spellings doesn't extend or translate into a respect for cultural heterogeneity.