Just a short random thought for you today.  I’ve mentioned before how I love the English language because of all the fun quirks it has stemming from its complex history.  Well, one of those quirks is the ability of some letters to create a wide variety of sounds or, conversely, the ability to create a particular sound out of very different combinations of letters.  To show you what I mean, let’s have a little fun with the word “potato”.  All six of those letters produce a sound that can be found elsewhere in English using different letters:

  • The “p” has the same sound as the “gh” at the end of hiccough, which is just another way to spell hiccup.
  • The “o” sound can be found at the end of although.
  • Phthisic is a disease of the lungs, such as asthma or tuberculosis, and the “phth” at the beginning makes a “t” sound.
  • Any schoolchild will tell you that “i” comes before “e”, except after “c”, or when sounding like “a” as in neighbor or weigh.
  • We need another “t,” so we’ll turn to that well-known flying dinosaur, the pterodactyl.
  • And the final “o,” we’ll take from the French-derived word beaux.

Putting all of that together, we arrive at our new word: ghoughphtheighpteaux.  Spell-checkers might not like it, but it sounds the same!

However, man cannot live on ghoughphtheighpteauxs alone, so what should we serve with them?  George Bernard Shaw recommends ghoti.