WORD

Words; the lifeblood of language, the main means of expressing oneself, communication. We all know what words are, what they do. Hell, you’re reading them right now. But what makes a word mean what it means? Why are they spelled the way they are? Who came up with some of the crazy shit you see in English?

Ah, the mysteries of life.

Here’s a question for you; what is your least favorite thing about the English language? There are lots of things that bug the poop out of me, like grammar, slang, and swear words, but none more so than the ridiculously convoluted spelling practices of our lovely language. For example: who in the world decided that the word “cough” would be spelled that way? I don’t know about you but they didn’t teach me that “gh” makes an “fff” sound when they taught me the alphabet. I’m pretty sure that makes no sense anyway. I mean, the letter G was clearly specified to have a guttural sound, like in “girl”. I can excuse using it for the word “giraffe” but only because when you sing the ABC’s, that’s what G sounds like, and spelling things phonetically makes me happy. But I’m still utterly confused as to why adding an H causes G to be mutated into a pseudo F. And that “ou” thing too; what is that? I thought O was doing just fine making that open mouth sound. Speaking of “ou”, how come “mouth” and “sound” are pronounced differently than “cough” when they have the same letters in the middle? Stupid. Why not just spell it “cof”? There is no reason to add an extra F! But no, English just has to be special and add pointless letters and make up random combinations to form a sound already covered by another letter. Way to go, English, way to go.

I was on the world wide interwebs the other night when I Stumbled upon something quite interesting (for those of you who are wondering why “Stumbled” is capitalized, please refer to stumbleupon.com). Did you know that you can technically spell “fish” completely different? Try spelling it “ghoti”. Yeah, I know. You’ll still be following the rules of English, don’t worry. Spell-check may not say you can but if you think about it, Spell-check says you can’t do a lot of things. Fragment sentence? HA! Who cares, Word, who really cares?? Anyway, back to “ghoti”: the reasons why you can spell it that way are several irregularities in the English language; “gh” as pronounced in “enough”, “o” as pronounced in “women”, and “ti” as pronounced in “nation”. Ghoti. I refuse to spell “fish” any other way now. Want to know why? Because if English can make no sense without anybody saying something, then so can I! I can see my English professor now: “You have way too many spelling errors for a college student! Go back and redo this.” And you know what? I think I’d have fun explaining to them why they’re not spelling errors and that in fact, I was only using phonetics. Excuse me; fonetiks.

I have also recently decided that the letter C is obsolete. I mean, the only two sounds it makes are already taken care of by S and K, so why even bother? And they told us learning Spanish would be hard. At least their alphabet stays the same!

Oh, and double letters can go to hell. Jeff Dunham’s Peanut clearly illustrates this when he says Jeff’s name: “Jef-f-fa!”. So true! Why do we bother? A double ‘o’ does the same thing for a word that the letter ‘u’ accomplishes. And a double ‘e’ can easily be replaced by a ‘y’! Or, if you’re going off what the alphabet says each letter sounds like, a singular ‘e’ will do the trick. “Coffee” need no longer be six letters long; let’s try four on for size! “cofy”. By God, we could spell it any way we wanted to, given that English has so many loopholes! “coughie”, “coughy”, “cafy”, etc. Thank the Lord that it’s spelled “café”, not “caffae”. Which you could do, if you wanted to. And you know what? I don’t even care that it’s underlined with a squiggly red mark. You don’t scare me, Word!

I hope that you have learned something new today by reading this. I look forward to seeing people write in a manner that makes sense. Hopefully. Please tell me some of your least favorite things about English! I love hearing other peoples’ rants! And just to make it fair, if you have something about English that you absolutely adore, please tell those to me as well, so I may understand why our language is the way it is.

Xoxo

p.s.

If you meet a kid named Fxrxexd, please inform him that you don’t like silent letters either.