A recent weird book thing

I've always like Malcolm Gladwell's essays. They're interesting and well written, often with a bit of a twist bringing a fresh point of view. You might remember his "Tipping Point" caught the attention of a lot of people.

We'll, he's revisited it. The Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

I saw it in the library and picked it up almost without thinking about it. Then when I was reading it, I had the oddest sensation that I'd read it before. That happens, of course. Publishers change covers, and sometimes different editions of a work will have different titles. Often there's a big time gap between the old and the news.

This was a bit different. I have no memory of ever seeing this cover before, and the book was published in 2024 so it wasn't even that long ago. There is no library stamp inside it indicating when they acquired it. I don't have a photo of it in Lightroom, or if I do I never edited it and it's buried. I don't have it on the shelf downstairs with the other Gladwell books, but maybe it was put somewhere else.

And yet, the book was entirely familiar, so I must have read it before, but have no memory of actually doing so. Anyways, it's a good read.

The other recent library book is a topic near and dear to my heart, enough is enuf by Gabe Henry.

I saw a reference to it on a youtube channel called RobWords, here. His voice gets a bit, I don't know, unctuous might be the right word, but it's sort of understandable given his profession and the topic at hand. Pronunciation would be important to him.

He brings up lots of interesting points about English words, and in one of them referenced this book. English is a brutally difficult language to spell, though that makes it one of the easiest languages to do puns in. I clearly remember a grade three class as we were taking turns reading out loud. I liked to read ahead and came across the word "island". All my readers know it's pronounced 'eye-land' and I knew it then because of the context, even though I'd never seen it in print. I also knew whoever was reading it would probably pronounce it as "is land" because the teacher was a stickler for saying "sound out the new word". And they did, and it was corrected. The teacher said it was an exception to the rules. 

Then later she got onto 'i before e except after c'. Given my name is spelled Keith, there's an exception right there. I later found out the rule is more complicated than that, depending on the sound the vowel pair makes, and there are still exceptions. So best not to think of it as a rule after all, and just memorize the spellings. And the pronunciations. There's a lot of that in English.

Consider:

The "ow" sound (when you cut your finger) and the "owe" sound (I need to pay off my bookie). Let's go through it.

Bow (and arrow) or Bow (to the king) but not spelled Bowe. What about Bough (of a tree)?

Cow 

There is no Dow, but there is Doe.

There is no Fow, or Fowe, but Foe.

There is no Gow, but there is Go.

How, but not Howe unless you're talking about Mr. Hockey, but Hoe.

Low, pronounced Lowe. But why not Lowd (loud).

Mow (part of a barn to store hay), and Mow (the lawn) but we pronounce it Mowe, but don't spell it Moe.

Now, but also No but not Noe or Nowe.

Pow, and Poe (the author).

Row (your boat) or Row (squabble), but we pronounce it Rowe, but don't spell it Roe because fish eggs, I guess.

Sow (a pig) or Sow (the seeds), but we pronounce it Sowe and don't spell it Soe, or Sew.

Tow (a trailer) or the Toe of your foot, but not Towe. And what about the whole To, Too, and Two thing?

Vow

Wow

That's just one example out of my head. Here's one from the book. "A rough cough and a hiccough plough me through." 

I can appreciate the desire for people to rationalize English, thinking a word ought to be spelled the way it sounds, or pronounced the way it's spelled. That a given sequence of letters should have a unique pronunciation and preferably, a unique meaning, but that ship has long sailed. 

But it's complicated. Oh boy, is it complicated. Words that have a similar appearance might come from different languages with different pronunciations. Then there was the Great Vowel Shift which influenced figuring out how to spell things when the printing press came along. It didn't help that the people running the printing press didn't speak English as their first language, and besides, it wasn't quite the English we know yet. Which sort of explains why food does not rhyme with good.

Part of the problem is that we have more word sounds than we have letters to express them. Yet creating new letters to express those sounds, or reassigning the sounds the existing letters make is enormously complicated. So many exceptions, and making changes makes the words look like the person using them is uneducated. We have letters from Latin, but English doesn't use Latin rules. We have words imported from other languages but we don't pronounce them the same way, and sometimes they overlap with existing words.

In the end, I admit to being a bit of a language snob. Just the other day I rejected a job application because the person was seeking a "carrer". It's good advice to not read the comments and certainly not take them seriously. But even the actual articles, I look at how it's written. Spelling mistakes and poor usage flag it as either AI, or someone that can't be troubled to express themselves clearly. Big red fail button, with some exceptions for people using English as a second language. 

Reforms are happening, though. Or is it tho? If I were texting someone I'd probably type that, unless the damnyouautocorrect fixed it correctly. Don't get me started on that. I'm sure that by the time I'm actually old, I'll be waving my cane at the text, shouting, "Hey you vandals, get off of my language!"

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