Skip to main content

The Chaos AKA English is Tough Stuff

I recently tripped across this clip of I love Lucy where Ricky reads a children's book and keeps running into different pronunciations of ough. It reminds me of the much longer poem called The Chaos which sometimes gets called English is Tough Stuff.

Wikipedia describes it as a poem demonstrating the irregularity of English spelling and pronunciation. Ricky goes on a rant about in Spanish, the same letters are always pronounced the same way. I have read that they don't have spelling bees in Spanish. That's a peculiarity of English education because of the extreme irregularity of English spelling and pronunciation.

àMy ex-husband and oldest son are both not very social and they read a LOT. They both are prone to quirky interpretations of the pronunciation of words they learned from reading.

As much as possible, I tried to make learning fun while homeschooling my kids. We spent a week on The Chaos while they objected to my pronunciation and looked it up only to find I was consistently correct.

I eventually gave up on arguing with my oldest about his pronunciation. He mostly talks to me and his brother using fancy words he knows from reading that I don't think he is pronouncing correctly.

Plus I don't know everything and sometimes imagine I'm right when I'm not. 

Be aware English has a lot of quirks of spelling and pronunciation. This is likely in part because English adopts a lot of foreign words, which has its good points but this is not one of them.

Chitterlings is the correct spelling of a word most often heard in the phrase hog jowls and chitterlings. It gets spelled the way it's pronounced -- chitlins -- so frequently that this has become an acceptable alternate spelling.

A professor of mine who spoke English as his fourth language told some anecdote about having trouble finding La Hoya. It's spelled La Jolla.

I grew up just off Buena Vista Road in Columbus, Georgia. The future ex informed me I and all locals were mispronouncing it and gave me the Spanish language pronunciation. In Columbus, it's byoona vista with a short I, not bwenna veesta.

If you want to know place name pronunciations in the US, ask a local. Local place names are frequently based on local Native American languages and there were hundreds of different tribes. Good luck guessing because you know English and a smattering of other European languages.

Jonesboro, Georgia is the correct spelling for a word typically spelled borough. And Alabama is home to Phenix City, no relation to Phoenix I guess.

1. If it matters, look it up.
2. If you aren't sure and can readily use a synonym, go with that.

People get REALLY judgy about others mispronouncing words they feel they know. It's a pissing contest smarty pants kids are encouraged to have in school. It's not one I want to have anymore.

I know too much to be sure I'm right and you are wrong. And counting coup is a social bad habit that almost never furthers clear communication and can cost you for years to come.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

The Hand Licking Incident

When my oldest son was seven and in second grade, we were living in Kansas. Some time after the school year started, he began licking his hands. He soon was doing so all day, every day. His teacher wanted it to stop. So did his dad, my husband. I was a young homemaker, financially dependent on my husband, and I was feeling enormously pressured by both of these people. I also felt they both had real careers and didn't genuinely respect me. They both felt it was my job and mine alone to somehow make my son stop licking his hands entirely. I caved to the pressure. I tried telling my child to stop. I tried spanking him. I tried putting unpleasant spices on his hands to deter him. I tried grilling him about why he was doing this so I could find some solution. He couldn't explain it and the terror in his eyes was disturbing. None of it made any difference whatsoever. He continued to lick his hands all day, every day. He just tried to hide it a little better. Meanwhile, our rela...
Read more

Crazy Conclusions in Early Childhood

From my last post on this site: One recurring theme: Bright kids of a certain age are just smart enough to jump to crazy conclusions rooted in lots of knowledge for their age but little real world experience. This seems common in the roughly toddler to preschool age range. I can readily think of a few examples of this from my oldest son's early years. The easiest one to tell is his ladybug freak out. He was about four years old and we were living in a third-floor walk-up in Germany. There were some really tall trees outside his bedroom window and one day there was a small ladybug invasion in his bedroom. He was inexplicably just terrified of the handful of yellow-and-black ladybugs on his bedroom wall. I actually laughed out loud because it seemed comical, but then I took him out of the room and closed the door and made sure he was protected from being around these bugs even though they were harmless. I kept the door shut to his room for a few days and he slept in my room u...
Read more

Letting him shine

Clip:  Save the Last Dance, audition scene I kind of hate the above scene. It's sort of cringe and probably highly unrealistic but movies do a lot of things to try to communicate plot points to the audience that a more realistic scene wouldn't communicate. The backstory is her mother died in a car wreck while she was at an audition if I recall correctly and she ends up moving in with her loser father, going from a big house in a very White suburb to a cramped inner city apartment and predominantly Black high school. She stops dancing, feeling like it's her fault her mother died. She gets involved with the boy in the above scene and on the phone a friend from the old neighborhood expresses surprise that there are any White boys to date at her new school and classmates give her a hard time about "a white girl taking one of the few good men we got." So there's a lot of social baggage here and he encourages her to resume dancing, helps her learn new moves from his...
Read more