Frazz by Jef Mallett for April 09, 2014

“The tough coughs as he plows the dough”. – Dr. Seuss

Slough is also a place in England, and isn’t pronounced the same as slough!

“English doesn’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”-James Nicoll

I believe that’s “The tough coughs as he ploughs the dough”.

And you wonder why us poor baffled foreigners with easy languages with real rules struggle to understand you. ;)

Already up to 4 hand-written pages of words that looks alike but do not sound or rhyme alike, If I find the rest of my Pots-It Notes, compiled from the thoughts at work and from Guests questions, I would have a pretty large compilation.

Already up to 4 hand-written pages of words that looks alike but do not sound or rhyme alike, If I find the rest of my Pots-It Notes, compiled from the thoughts at work and from Guests questions, I would have a pretty large compilation.

Spelling has always been a week point for me.“i before e except after c”Yeah right, what about “Weird Science”?And why do “label” and “table” sound the same but switch around the last letters?!Grammar on the other hand, I have no problem with. (I just have trouble spelling “grammor”, uh “grammer”, oh forget it!)

And just how is “wough” pronounced?

My last name is Slough. In restaurants, my ex would have them ask for table for Bobby. We would never recognize the name, otherwise. Call me anything, but late for dinner.

For those who don’t understand how “ghoti” can be pronounced “fish”, it comes from multiple words

“gh” sounds like “f” in words like enough“o” sounds like “i” in women“ti” sounds like “sh” in words like nation

Whuced ahn faunex werekt fourgh mei!

The “-ough” words all rhymed once, though. And as recently in the mid-1700s you’ll find lower-class characters in novels who say “thruff”, as in “I had to go thruff the foreſt to come here, my lord.”

“-gh” actually represents the old English letter ȝ (“yogh”), which was abolished several hundred years ago when pedants complained that it couldn’t be a real letter because it wasn’t used in Latin. In England, it was usually replaced with “y” or “gh”, but in Scotland it was sometimes replaced with “z”, where it is still found in Scottish names such as “Dalziel” and “Culzean”.

Dr. Seuss in his early days wrote a book called The Tough Coughs as he Ploughs the Dough.

Sum gud stough hear. Maid mi grin :D

And bough!

Check out The Chaos — a fabulous poem, but simply too long to reproduce in full here.

I taught English as a second language……I always apologized for the inconsistency of our words and said English borrows words from other languages….

You’d be surprised how often I had to say…“I don’t know why, that’s just the way it is….” Many times you don’t even notice the inconsistencies until someone asks about it, and you try to explain it….

“And you want to know what English is? English is the attempt of Norman men-at-arms to make dates with Saxon barmaids, and no more legitimate than any of the other results.”

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard that, I would have, hmmm… maybe thirty-five cents!

How about words that sound the same, are spelled the same and have completely different meanings:

I sat very still as I watched the fly fly around the room and land on my fly.

Now that is what makes English a difficult language!

The Tough Coughs As He Ploughs the Dough: Early Writings and Cartoons by Dr. Seussavailable at bookstores and well worth the money!

How about giving credit to Dr. Seuss for his book “The Tough Coughed as He Plowed the Dough”?

I’m still looking for an orange doorhinge.

@masterskrain Because Einstein was German?

German gets a new word by describing it in as few words as possible, taking out the between spaces, and running them together. French gives a new word to l’Academie Française, which studies it for a decade before deciding whether it may be used in a legal document or not. English looks around to see if some language already has a word for it, and steals it. Since most world languages use the Roman alphabet, they keep the spelling, which may or my not be pronounced by English phonetics. As a result, a word may be spelled the same in several languages, mean the same, but not pronounced anywhere near the same – even in the same country.