The Vent and Rant Thread

[Bilbo1967]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Maybe we should form a club for proper English speaking folks.

We could call it the "I Before E Except After C Society".

Good plan.

Perhaps we should limit the membership to eight people, to keep freight costs down. Anybody merely feigning interest will be committing a heinous crime and their neighbours will be informed and their assets considered forfeit and seized. Uniform of the group will be beige and all must submit to the sovereign of the group (either elected or not). Neither will being foreign be considered a salve to their conscience, although a surfeit of protein, codeine, height, weight or heifers is fine (if a little weird).

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by Bilbo1967

Good plan.

Perhaps we should limit the membership to eight people, to keep freight costs down. Anybody merely feigning interest will be committing a heinous crime and their neighbours will be informed and their assets considered forfeit and seized. Uniform of the group will be beige and all must submit to the sovereign of the group (either elected or not). Neither will being foreign be considered a salve to their conscience, although a surfeit of protein, codeine, height, weight or heifers is fine (if a little weird).

you gotta love the english language.

[Lady Blue]

Originally Posted by Bilbo1967

Good plan.

Perhaps we should limit the membership to eight people, to keep freight costs down. Anybody merely feigning interest will be committing a heinous crime and their neighbours will be informed and their assets considered forfeit and seized. Uniform of the group will be beige and all must submit to the sovereign of the group (either elected or not). Neither will being foreign be considered a salve to their conscience, although a surfeit of protein, codeine, height, weight or heifers is fine (if a little weird).

Picky, picky, picky.

[Bilbo1967]

Originally Posted by Lady Blue

Picky, picky, picky.

Thanks - fixed that now.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Bilbo1967

FISH could be logically spelt GHOTI, as in:

The GH sound from 'enough'
The O sound from 'women'
The TI sound from 'nation'

What a great language!

Here's a short poem. Be sure to read it aloud!

Brush up Your English

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead – it’s said like bed, not bead.
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat:
They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.

A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose –
Just look them up – and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart.
Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start.

A dreadful language? Man alive!
I’d mastered it when I was five!

[Bilbo1967]

That is great

Thanks for sharing.

[yvanleterrible]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

i don't know whether to laugh or cry at that.

This is the main reason I don't write much on Facebook. I will not tolerate language transformations for the quickness of text messaging. Facebook is filled with those. That's sad...

[wodin]

I am a USA-an also, but I'm kind of partial to (some) british spelling, I prefer "programme" to "program" any day. And as for those gray tyres, well ...

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Here's a short poem. Be sure to read it aloud!

Brush up Your English

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead – it’s said like bed, not bead.
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat:
They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.

A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose –
Just look them up – and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart.
Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start.

A dreadful language? Man alive!
I’d mastered it when I was five!

crikey !

i readily admit, i am not sure how to pronounce hiccough or lough (nor what it means). but i'm pretty sure i can handle the rest of those.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by yvanleterrible

This is the main reason I don't write much on Facebook. I will not tolerate language transformations for the quickness of text messaging. Facebook is filled with those. That's sad...

1. that really depends on whose page you are reading.
2. i'm pretty sure those were examples of ignorance, not shortcuts... which makes it worse.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Here's a short poem. Be sure to read it aloud!

Brush up Your English

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead – it’s said like bed, not bead.
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat:
They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.

A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose –
Just look them up – and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart.
Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start.

A dreadful language? Man alive!
I’d mastered it when I was five!

Beautiful! As bad as I am with foreign tongues, I thank whatever powers that be that I don't have to face the daunting task of having to learn English from scratch!

[kindlekitten]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

crikey !

i readily admit, i am not sure how to pronounce hiccough or lough (nor what it means). but i'm pretty sure i can handle the rest of those.

hiccough is hic-cup, just fancier. lough is lew. I didn't know that one until my late 30s and moving to the northwest. there were many signs announcing "such and such lough". I had to ask my uncle who had been resident for about 20 years about both the pronunciation and meaning... it is an area of seawater that is all but landlocked. it receives quite often fresh water as well, but will always have too much seawater to make it potable. the advantage to these that are navigable is that they make dandy sheltered waterways... sheltered from violent water activity that is

[WT Sharpe]

One of the finest statements Winston Churchill probably never made is the remark he probably never made about ending a sentence with a preposition.

“This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.”

(The first appearance of any variant of this quote appears to trace back to an issue of the Strand Magazine that attributed it to “the original writer” of a certain memorandum.)

[kindlekitten]

sounds like perfect Pennsylvania Dutch to me!

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

hiccough is hic-cup, just fancier. lough is lew. I didn't know that one until my late 30s and moving to the northwest. there were many signs announcing "such and such lough". I had to ask my uncle who had been resident for about 20 years about both the pronunciation and meaning... it is an area of seawater that is all but landlocked. it receives quite often fresh water as well, but will always have too much seawater to make it potable. the advantage to these that are navigable is that they make dandy sheltered waterways... sheltered from violent water activity that is

Also pronounced lock (or loch) in Northern England.

An alternative I've seen used for lough in that part of the poem is slough, which can have several pronunciations, but I like 'sluff', which is the pronunciation when it's the verb meaning to shed (something). E.g. The snake sloughed its old skin.