Some Spelling Help

     In my rounds as the English language’s foremost defender on the Web, I’ve noticed that an old and very useful rule about spelling has been neglected — possibly with malice aforethought. There’s no help for it; I must once again leap into action.

     The rule:

I before E,
Except After C,
Or When Sounded Like A,
As In Neighbor And Weigh

     The rule applies when the letters i and e occur juxtaposed within the same syllable. Therefore:

1. It’s not peice, it’s piece.
2. It’s not seige, it’s siege.
3. It’s not feild, it’s field.
4. It’s not cheif, it’s chief.
5. It’s not breif, it’s brief.
6. It’s not freind, it’s friend.
7. It’s not acheive, it’s achieve.
8. It’s not conciet, it’s conceit (note the c).
9. It’s not cieling, it’s ceiling (note the c).
10. It’s not recieve, it’s receive (note the c).
11. It’s not vien, it’s vein (Sounded like a).
12. It’s not hienous, it’s heinous (Sounded like a).

     And so on. There are some exceptions. Two come to mind at once: seize and weird. But there aren’t many others.

     Note the single-syllable aspect of the rule. When the i and the e are parts of two different syllables, they can be in reverse order. For example, consider the word society, where because of the preceding c we would normally expect the e before the i. The syllabification dictates the exception: so-ci-e-ty.

     If you write, it’s important to spell correctly -- especially if you write fiction. I’m not trying to be a dictator about this, but the rule is easy to remember and easy to follow, so why let such elementary mistakes in spelling spoil the legibility of your prose? Granted that most spellcheckers will catch such errors for you, remembering to use the spellchecker can be a problem all by itself!

     Verbum sat sapienti.

Quickies: GAAAHHHHH!

     Damn it all, only one day after a disquisition on why “the rules” aren’t necessarily binding, I find myself compelled to do this.

     Watch your homophones, Gentle Readers. Words that sound the same don’t necessarily mean the same thing. Indeed, I can’t think of a case where they do.

     I just encountered this phrase:

     If this sort of thing peaks your interest...

     No, no, NO!! The word you want is pique:

pique v: to excite (interest, curiosity, etc.):
Her curiosity was piqued by the gossip.

     I’ve been encountering quite a lot of homophone errors lately, and they drive me straight up the BLEEP!ing wall. I know that spellcheckers are useless against them. Worse, most grammar checkers won’t detect them either. The most common ones are the “its / it’s,” “to / too / two,” and “there / their / they’re” groups, but others have been proliferating in a spirit of “My turn!”

     Here’s another that’s completely avoidable: the use of lead where led — the past tense of the verb to lead — is correct.

     This one had me laughing so hard I hurt myself:

     She had a when on her right cheek.

     HUH?! The word is wen: “a benign encysted tumor of the skin, especially on the scalp, containing sebaceous matter; a sebaceous cyst.” (Dictionary.com)

     Yes, these homophone errors can be very funny, but the English language is taking a fair amount of damage from them. Words are tools! Each has its proper applications. You wouldn’t use a chainsaw to drive a nail, would you? Not a running one, at least?

     What time is it, sweetie? Only 4:40 EST? Great God in heaven, I need a drink!

Quickies: Yet Another Plea For Good Punctuation

     I have no intention of embarrassing the blogger who wrote the following:

     If you want to solve the pension crisis, the state, local, federal government debt crisis, the student loan crisis, and all of the other crises which are besetting us work to end the progressive model and allow the new to replace it.

     ...and...

     He's a progressive he can't afford to tell the truth.

     ...but I must say: they’re awfully hard on the eye, to say nothing of the mind. Improperly punctuated sentences are like that. They can defeat one’s best attempts at syntactic or semantic analysis until the proper punctuation is inserted.

     Lynne Truss’s excellent little book Eats, Shoots, and Leaves is a must-read for anyone who’s been gigged for poor punctuation. It’s both funny and instructive. Having said that, allow me to present a puzzler a friend gave me some years ago. She asked: “Can you write a sentence in which the word and occurs five consecutive times, but is nevertheless correct and comprehensible?”

     Here’s the answer, in story form:

     For many years, Joe sold fish and chips from a little kiosk along the bank of the Thames. After three decades of labor, he had amassed funds sufficient to get himself a regular storefront, and he wanted everything about it to be perfect. As part of his effort, he commissioned a sign painter to construct a magnificent marquee for his new shop. Unfortunately, Joe had a problem with the sign painter’s initial effort:

JOE’S FISHANDCHIPS

     Joe wanted the sign to be more readable than that. (He was no fan of neologisms.) So he wrote the sign painter a note, describing how he wanted the sign redone:

“Put spaces between ‘fish’ and ‘and,’ and ‘and’ and ‘chips.’”

     Imagine how hard that sentence would be to parse if it weren’t properly punctuated.

Quickies: Happy New Year! 2019 Is Off To An Agrammatical Start

     It might be unwise, but the second thing I do after getting up is to review my list of material sources. (The first is, of course, to get a cup of coffee.) And what do I find in the “news” from across the puddle?

     Shalom Mendoza, 21, was taken into custody at a Taco Bell in Paso Robles, more than 200 miles southeast of the prison, on Saturday after receiving a tip from a member of the public.

     Excuse me? Are you saying that the “tip from a member of the public” was sent to Shalom Mendoza? Did he take himself into custody? Immured himself in a cell at the Paso Robles Taco Bell, no doubt.

     It’s not even 5:00 AM EST, and 2019 is already shaping up pretty much as I expected.

A Quick Lexical Bitch

     Today promises to be a frazzler, and anyway, all I have at the moment is this:

• When we speak of whether a thing is legal, we are discussing its legality.
• When we say that a man is frugal, we are noting his frugality.
• And when we describe a condition as normal...

     Hint, hint! It’s not “normalcy.”

     (Warren G. Harding was a better president than many suppose, but as a speaker of English...well, he was a much better president.)

     I’ll probably be back later with something more substantial.