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5 Reasons the English Language Makes No Freaking

SenseBy Kate Peregrina November 27, 2013 597,479 views

As much as we might judge people for their bad spelling, the truth is that English spelling doesn't make any

goddamn sense. Just look at that sentence: Why is there an "n" but no "n" sound in "goddamn"? It turns out

there's one perfectly good reason for that and many other eccentricities of the language, and that one good reason

is actually a bunch of stupid reasons that are all shitty and terrible. Like ...

#5. "O" and "U" (and "C" and "K") Sound the Same Because of Sloppy

Handwriting

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The Crazy Rule:

Writing has become second nature to us, so it's easy to forget how schizophrenic the letter "o" is. You get the

word "con," where its sound is basically "aw," but then in "son" it's encroaching on "u" territory, and that's a

good way to get your face cut ("u" don't take no shit). Then you have "comb" and "tomb," which are totally

different "o" sounds despite having no right to be. Then there are phrases like "some honey tongue" and ... whoa,

this article is already way dirtier than we expected it to be.

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We know what that sentence has all of you thinking about: that "mouth" is spelled pretty weirdly, too.

The Stupid Reason:

It all comes down to sloppy handwriting. In medieval times, highly stylized writing focused on the "minims," or

vertical lines in a letter, and the smudgy nature of ink confused people trying to read it. For example, "in," "ni,"

"m," "iii," "ui," and "iu" might all look exactly the same because the horizontal lines written into each letter were so

thin, they tended to smudge or just fade away. For example, this:

Harvard

This says "animal," like you fancy yourself in the sack, or "annnal," which is a rather annoying way to ask for it,

or "aiiuiiai," which is the sound you're going to make when you head for your partner's fire door without

permission and get punched in the throat. The solution to all this buggery was to just stop using "u" for some

words, like "some," "love," and "come," and wow, we just cannot get out of the gutter here. This is the reason

why you see an "o" for a "u" sound when it's next to an "n" or an "m," like in "monkey" and "ton," and also why

you see a "c" before a "k" when the letter appears next to more minims. The "c" was a good way to separate the

"k" from letters it could be easily confused with, which led to spellings such as "lick" and "flick" and ... we're

going to open a new tab here and take care of some things before this next entry.

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By which we mean listening to some classic Slick Rick.

#4. Some Words Are Spelled Wrong Because Academics Are Pretentious

Jerkwads

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The Crazy Rule:

Every once in a while English words will have silent letters in them -- like "receipt," "debt," "scissor," and "island."

And there's actually a really interesting explanation for that: English teachers hate you and want you to fail. Why

else is the language so littered with invisible minefields of perceived stupidity?

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"I contain 19 words that have a 'q' not followed by a 'u.' Enjoy guessing, motherfucker."

The Stupid Reason:

Over the last 500 years, there's been a continuing effort to standardize all spelling -- and a lot of the stuffy

academic types making the rules made a real mess of it. In the 16th century, the peopleputting together

dictionaries decided to insert a "b" into "debt" and "doubt" to remind everyone that they had evolved from the

Latin word "debitum" -- even though the preferred spellings, "dette" and "doute," made way more sense. But hey,

at least the common man would forever be reminded of precious Latin, thus ensuring that it would never become

a dead langua- oh wait, no, it died more completely than an engineer on the away team, didn't it? The academics

did the exact same thing with "receipt" (then spelled "receit," but drawn from the Latin word "recepta") and

smugly smirked down at generations of dyslexics accidentally writing "recipe."

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"You've never heard of the silent 'x'? Enjoy your mainstream spell ing, sheeple."

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Changing the spelling to match the Latin origin is at least mildly understandable, if kind of a dick move -- but less

understandable is changing spellings to match Latin words they have nothing to do with, which also happened.

Photos.com

At least they resisted the urge to use that stupid font.

The origin of the word "island" is the Old English word "yland" or "iland," but since the Latin word "insula" has a

similar meaning, academics decided to just throw an "s" in there, because more Latin = more smarter. That one

was so influential that it actually changed the word for the central walkway in a church -- up until then spelled

"aile" -- to "aisle," because "s" is friggin' sexy, we guess. All those curves. Go ahead and toss it in there. Liven

that sucker up.

#3. The Difference Between "-el" and "-le" Is Due to Stubbornly Clinging to

Tradition

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The Crazy Rule:

Actually, there are no rules here at all. This is the Thunderdome of English spelling. You know what? That's not

even fair. The Thunderdome had at least one rule. This shit is way worse: Some words that end in an "L" sound

are spelled "-el" ("novel," "level," "cancel"), and some are spelled "-le" ("little," "cable," "purple").

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Warner Bros.

Not that Thunderdome stuck to the two-man rule too closely either.

The Stupid Reason:

Most words that end in "-el" used to have the stress carried on that last syllable (so "angel" used to be pronounced

"ang-EL"). As the language evolved, those pronunciations slowly blended together, but we still clung to the old

spellings for no reason other than tradition, which apparently doesn't count for pronunciation as well.

No, really: One of the most frustrating and counterintuitive quirks to our language exists just because. There's no

practical reason, no aesthetic reason, no etymological quirk. It's just some leftover fat dangling off the side of our

language like a syntactic appendix. The only use it has now is to help prospective employers distinguish between

people who were able to take SAT prep courses and those who weren't, primarily so they can tell the latter that

they're just not Waffle House material.

George Doyle/Stockbyte/Getty Images

"The proper spelling of 'rondel'? Right away, sir!"