Most of the time, when I sit down, I have nothing to say. Today is that day, so I’m going to resort to verbal diarrhea which is what my cognitive therapist calls the drunk talking that I do when I’m too tired to leave her office, a tutoring session, or my friend’s house on a Friday night.
Damn. I’m beyond the verbal diarrhea stage and going into the sitting silently with Airpods in my ears set to any random podcast that I might or might not listen to while I look at Reddit on my phone.
I’ve typed diarrhea twice now and you know what? I want to protest the spelling of that word. Who’s in charge of correcting the words that are totally spelled wrong in the English language? I want to make a complaint. Here’s a list of some of the spellings that annoy me:
diarrhea (I have to apologize to those people who visualize as they read. Seriously, I’m sorry about all the verbal diarrhea, word vomit, and just being a big green snot in general.)
enough
phonics (Really? Who the hell thought of this word as a way to simplify sounding words out for children? Who was that asshole?)
through (It’s halfway there thanks to the drive thru crowd.)
dough (Look, donut made the transition so dough should follow. In fact, it should have led the way. But, will we confuse our newest readers if it looks like do, did, doing? Maybe dow would do for a downut. Dammit, I can’t get this down.)
psychotic, psychic, and psychology
sorbet (Maybe we should change it to psorrhbeigh.)
straight, light, fight, tight, right, night (I don’t know what we should do with knight, do you?)
knife, knock, knit, knowledge, knackered, knot, knob, knees, know (Well, that makes a new problem: what do we do with the duplicates for nit, not, no, and rite for that matter?)
when, what, where (Dammit, there are too many complications like were, was, and the potential switch in pronunciation to werewolf. I think I’m done. I’m defeated. Now, I’m staring listlessly at the word done and wondering why it doesn’t rhyme with bone, cone, tone, hone, zone, lone, alone, and phone. Shit, dammit, sack-sucker lug nut.)
I read an explanation once of why we don’t go straight for spelling phonetically because it would become unintelligible to the general reader. Then, the author of this explanation gradually moved to spelling phonetically and by the end of the paragraph, I couldn’t read what he wrote. Okay, I get it, but couldn’t we agree on about ten words a year? Surely, the English speakers could relearn to spell ten nasty words a year, just some of the worst one?
Couldn’t we?
I think I heard an Englishman in the back whisper, “Have we had any luck in London changing the spelling of colour?”
Thank you for listening, jules