I Before E, Except, After C – FU
This post was published 1 year 1 month 9 days ago which may make its actuality or expire date not be valid anymore. This site is not responsible for any misunderstanding.Seems that the prim and proper Brits have done away with probably the most well known grammatical rule.
Advice sent to teachers says there are too few words which follow the rule and recommends using more modern methods to teach spelling to schoolchildren.
The document, entitled Support for Spelling, is being distributed to more than 13,000 primary schools. [...]
It says: “The i before e rule is not worth teaching. It applies only to words in which the ie or ei stands for a clear ee sound. Unless this is known, words such as sufficient and veil look like exceptions.
“There are so few words where the ei spelling for the ee sounds follows the letter c that it is easier to learn the specific words.” These include receive, ceiling, perceive and deceit.
The document recommends other ways to teach pupils spelling, like studying television listings for compound words, changing the tense of a poem to practise irregular verbs and learning about homophones through jokes such as “How many socks in a pair? None — because you eat a pear.”
Kinda wonky, I know, but I just felt years of education just evaporate away.
Except of course, it’s not a grammatical rule, it’s a spelling rule.
The most important, and apparently overlooked, comment in the article was Jack Bovill’s , “… it would be helpful if spelling were allowed to evolve.”
This idea that there’s only one way to spell a word is absurd, and really quite new. Most attribute our bizarre fondness for a fixed and immutable language (in the face of so much contrary evidence) to Samuel Johnson, whose dictionary was sponsored by publishers interested in the cost savings offered by a normalized spelling.
“It would be helpful if spelling were allowed to evolve.”
— Jack Bovill, 2009 —
“People think that just because you don’t spell well, you’re dumb.
What kind of people? Smart-alecky people who can’t think of but one way to spell a word, that’s who. That’s not spelling, it’s a failure of the imagination.”
— Donald Kaul, writing for the St. Petersburg Evening Independent – July 3, 1986 —
“My spelling is Wobbly. It’s good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.”
— A. A. Milne, 1926 —
“A man must be a great fool who can’t spell a word more than one way.”
— Marshall Brown, “Wit and Humor” (1880) —
“I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.”
— Possibly misattributed to Mark Twain. —
“Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays.”
— George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1872 —
So by your logic, you’re totally fine with the English language devolving into txt-speak?
srsly y nawt ghiff et ae tri?
;)
Great Comment!