I'm speechless.
Want. Porridge. Forage. Change. Juicy. Or even just juice.
Axe. Whipped. Worthwhile. Whimsy. Whole. Pretty much anything that starts with
a “wh”. These are some of my words that have me head-scratching. They are
favorite words. Or they are words that start to look weird the longer you stare
at them. ß
which makes anyone on earth sound like they’re stoned when they say that
outloud. But it’s TRUE! You must must MUST have a word or list of words that
make your brain pause and your eyes stare and fully distract you from
completing the task at hand, which, if you like to write or tend to do it for,
you know, your job, can be problematic. Or there are words that make your teeth feel funny even
if you’re only thinking them in your head and not saying them outloud. Or that
break all the logical conventions of the historically streamlined American
English language. But if we stopped to think before we said or wrote anything simply because it's all so gosh dang fascinating,
we’d all be left speechless.
Change. CHANGE. change. cHaNgE. ChAnGe. Change. Go ahead. Stare at
it. It looks funny. Say it over and over again. It feels funny. Ergo, change is funny.
Axe. It’s so pretty!
It’s like a pickaxe turned on its side.
It’s like a pickaxe turned on its side.
It makes sense cause it looks like a thing, most noticeably,
the thing that it actually represents. That! Is amazing.
You know there are so many other languages in the world that
incorporate all the regions of the mouth in speech. Clicks and
throat-clearings, and tongue slaps and guttural shrills and minor inflections
of the spit against the inside of the teeth. American English relies on the
letters. The letters have to do the job to convey what the word represents. And
we’d like to keep our speech workout limited to the front of the tongue. And so
sometimes we come across words that make our puny mouth muscles uncomfortable
and squirmy, and make us want to avoid them and use alternates instead. Like “roar”. I'll just say "loud sound" or "lion-flavored meow". Also bad: “O’Roarke”. That’s a name, and it’s Irish, but the point is it makes my
mouth want to pitch a fit and sulk in a corner.
Now porridge. Oh porridge. Or perhaps it’s your fault,
forage. You represent a failure in language to ever abide by a set of rules.
Somewhere along the way someone decided that vowels would have a short or
long sound based on how they partner inside the word with consonants, whether
they’re single, double and end in an 'e' or not. Say porridge. Say forage. Now
look at them. They break convention, and it’s frustrating. Was such a thing
done deliberately? Totally. From now on I’m going to spell them forridge and
porage. And you, spellcheck ghost that lives in my computer, can just go to
hell.
Also, I was really thinking this could be a quite long and
thought-provoking blog post. And now I realize I was wrong.
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