Thursday, April 4, 2013

The English Rebellion: ‘I’ Before ‘E’ except after ‘C’

For many years, the English language has been filled with confusing words and sentences. It is ridden with words with thousands of meanings and meanings with thousands of words. In these segments, I aim at rooting out the issues with language and start: An English Rebellion

Most English speaker at some point in their English learning hear this old saying explaining some key spelling tips. The saying goes, “I’ before ‘E’ except after ‘C’ or sounding like ‘A’ as in ‘neighbor’ or ‘weigh.’”

This rule seems simple and easy to follow, and you can apply in certain cases, like with the word ‘friend’ or ‘beige.’ This universal rule seems to make the English language a lot more simple, which as I said, is the purpose of the English Rebellion. You’d think I would love this rule, but I don’t. “Why?” you ask. Because it doesn’t work.

This rule a bunch of exceptions which cause confusion to anyone who relies on this rule. Some exceptions are: seize, weird, either, height, foreign, leisure, counterfeit, forfeit, neither, their, reinsure, ancient, species, science, sufficient, society.

These regular, everyday words contradict this rule, which begs the question, why have the rule?

The rules are made to make things easier, but this rule just leads to confusions. This is why I urge the world to rid itself of this rule and stop making this language so unnecessarily confusing!

Comment Question: What do you think? Should we keep this rule or get rid of it? Will you join the rebellion?

-The Anon Blogger

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1 comment:

  1. It's not really a rule, more of an aspirational guideline. Currently it has little if any legal standing.

    ReplyDelete

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