I put a spell on you

I think I was in first grade when my teacher wrote the word "neighbor" up on the black board. "That's it", I said to myself, "I give up. The way English words are spelled makes no sense. I am not even going to try learn this idiotic stuff!" Math was much more logical and I was very good at it. Back in kindergarten they had taught us our letters and the sounds that they represent. A makes an "a" sound, b makes a "b", on through c, d, e and all the way to z. Then in first grade we found out that those sounds were just a suggestion. The sounds represented by the letters in a word may or may not have any correlation with what we were previously taught. G might mean "j", c could mean "ess" or it could mean "ka". Combinations of letters were even worse. Ph for "f", ti for "sh" and gh for whatever, like the "y" sound in neighbor.

That's of course if the letter represents any sound at all. "Silent letters" are sprinkled freely throughout the language. First the teacher introduced the silent "e", telling us that it is there to indicate that the previous vowel is pronounced with a long vowel sound. Made sense. But then other silent letters are introduced with no rhyme or reason. Lamb, fillet and through have silent letters at the end. Herb has one at the beginning.

Later on, about in the sixth grade, we were taught that the reason for variation in English spellings was the fact that some of the words came from different languages. Especially french. And so we have words like "bouquet" and "tomb". From the Greek we get words like "psyche"and "graphic". Now the French were not exactly the best people to borrow spellings from, they spell "o", "eau". Which is also how they spell "u". The explanation is nonsense anyway, there are lots of french words that have been given English spellings, like "flute". And words from other languages are always given English spellings, words like "judo" from Japanese and "glasnost" from Russian. Are we holding on to the arcane spellings for sentimental reasons?

No I think the real reason for the variations in spellings is a vast institutional conspiracy. From the top where professors with PhDs. in English at Oxford write dictionaries all the way down to the bottom where my first grade teacher threw various pronunciations at us daily there is an insidious deliberate attempt to muddle the language and make it more difficult to comprehend. Job security. English is a hard language to learn to read and write. They want it that way. And they have every since the English threw the French out. School headmasters at that time realized they were sitting on a gold mine and decided to milk it. So here we are to day.

Even the "rules" they give us to help make it easier to remember how to spell words are not consistent. "I before e except after c."

It's their rule.

OWL

April 11, 2007