I Hate George Bernard Shaw
My precious antique words! Aww, look what ya done to them!
I hate George Bernard Shaw, not for his socialism, to which I'm fairly indifferent, but for the ghoti example. I recently read this article. For the lazy, I shall summarize: ghoti cannot spell fish, because even though gh makes an f sound sometimes, it never does so at the beginning of a word. The same treatment is applied to the ti at the end.
While I appreciate any attack on Shavian lunacy, this only scratched the surface, for you see, dear reader, gh doesn't really sound like f.
It annoys me that a man who wrote a play with variant pronunciations as a plot device could not realize that only people with degenerate accents are capable of ending "tough" and "fluff" with exactly the same sounds. To form an f sound, the lips make much closer contact than with the Scottish-derived soft gh. Same with the ti; the position of the tongue against the back of the top row of teeth is different than with sh.
Try it sometime. Unless you have split your tongue to make your Serpentor cosplay sessions more intense, it should work. Say the example words provided by my literary foe, and pay attention to what goes on inside your mouth. Subtle complexity and confusing laws from bygone days are what make English great, and I'm glad nobody (at least, nobody who mattered) ever took the old hack seriously enough to implement his plan for homogenization.
It doesn't help to calm my raging ire that Shaw fans have a tendency to listen to Digable Planets and wear Birkenstocks with socks.
I sometimes fear that the trend toward "one word, one definition" will do to vocabulary what Shaw wanted to do to pronunciation. Sexual harassment, child molestation, and dozens of other phrases have become buzzwords, and words that formerly had multiple definitions have now acquired implied connotations. As far as most people know or care, harassment is always sexual.
On an unrelated note, I hate that there is a crotchety blind man running the snack bar in the basement of the county courthouse. Not that I begrudge the guy his living; hell, it's even respectable, Lord knows I don't have that kind of work ethic. If I had a handicap that could bring in government money, I wouldn't be working. What bothers me is that my life is making references to Night Court, and that I wasted enough of my preteen years watching Night Court to get it.
While I appreciate any attack on Shavian lunacy, this only scratched the surface, for you see, dear reader, gh doesn't really sound like f.
It annoys me that a man who wrote a play with variant pronunciations as a plot device could not realize that only people with degenerate accents are capable of ending "tough" and "fluff" with exactly the same sounds. To form an f sound, the lips make much closer contact than with the Scottish-derived soft gh. Same with the ti; the position of the tongue against the back of the top row of teeth is different than with sh.
Try it sometime. Unless you have split your tongue to make your Serpentor cosplay sessions more intense, it should work. Say the example words provided by my literary foe, and pay attention to what goes on inside your mouth. Subtle complexity and confusing laws from bygone days are what make English great, and I'm glad nobody (at least, nobody who mattered) ever took the old hack seriously enough to implement his plan for homogenization.
It doesn't help to calm my raging ire that Shaw fans have a tendency to listen to Digable Planets and wear Birkenstocks with socks.
I sometimes fear that the trend toward "one word, one definition" will do to vocabulary what Shaw wanted to do to pronunciation. Sexual harassment, child molestation, and dozens of other phrases have become buzzwords, and words that formerly had multiple definitions have now acquired implied connotations. As far as most people know or care, harassment is always sexual.
On an unrelated note, I hate that there is a crotchety blind man running the snack bar in the basement of the county courthouse. Not that I begrudge the guy his living; hell, it's even respectable, Lord knows I don't have that kind of work ethic. If I had a handicap that could bring in government money, I wouldn't be working. What bothers me is that my life is making references to Night Court, and that I wasted enough of my preteen years watching Night Court to get it.