In response to all of the rhyming internet memes about how English spelling is just so wacky, I offer this humble consideration:
We’ll assume English spelling is riddled with flaws,
And rife with exceptions, directions, and laws.
We’ll complain that it doesn’t spell words like they sound,
And moan about how silent letters abound.
No language on earth makes its plurals just one way,
But when our tongue’s the subject, we cluck and we say,
“Let’s take our laments, make them into a poem,
The whining and rhyming together will show’em!”
We’ll write our assumptions on how spelling works
in tongue-in-cheek meter and anapest verse.
We’ll point out some words that we don’t understand
And instead of explaining them, throw up our hands!
‘Cause certainly if we don’t know why a word
Is spelled as it is, then it *must* be absurd.
It can’t simply be that we just never learned
How written words’ structures can best be discerned.
It can’t simply be that we’re dullards and dense.
Surely our writing system couldn’t make sense!
2 Comments
Awesome Gina!
Rhyming and analogy
are utilized,
but be careful when
teaching what
can be analyzed.
As rhyme can be faulty
when spelling words,
that are created from history
and are NOT absurd.
Come come, Gina; we do have to try to summon up some pity for the internet nincompoops’ versified rantings that so blatantly parade their profound orthographic debility. They are simply victims of edubabbling orthodoxy in schools.
Closely associated with these poetasters of piffle are the well-intentioned but ill-informed spelling reformers. These earnest do-gooders would do well to devote their energies to understanding the linguistic facts of the coherently consistent and elegantly predictable system that we already have before pushing their ersatz and vapid alternatives.
How well it is the sun and moon
Are placed so very high,
That no presuming man may reach
To pluck them from the sky.
If ‘twere not so I do believe
That some reforming ass
Would soon attempt to pluck them down
And light the world with gas.
(Popular rhyme c. 1832)
Undoubtedly, though, the most to be pitied are the spawners of spelling schemes who, when they can’t explain a spelling conclude that there can be no explanation, and advertise their orthographic incomprehension by calling it an ‘exception’.
As Dr Johnson might well have said, calling a word that one cannot oneself explain an ‘exception’ is the last refuge of the orthographic scoundrel.