Ask Lemmy

My wife and I had a good snicker one time when I brought home edamame peas in the shell.

They were shelled, but she wanted them shelled.

Flammable/imflammable is another one that comes to mind.

Just remember

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Bought, caught, taught, fought, thought, sought, and wrought are all past tense verbs and all rhyme. The present tense forms are buy, catch, teach, fight, think, seek, and work, none of which rhyme.

Fast can mean moving with great speed or fixed securely in place (among other things).

The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité (1922)

https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.

Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.
...

Very long. Highly recommended

It's because the people who set the rules for the English language, could barely speak it.

The first guy to popularize the printing press was Dutch, so the guy who bought England's first one didn't know how it worked and neither did any English speaker

So he hired a bunch of Dutch who knew how to operate it.

And they got a bunch of handwritten books and were told to mass reproduce them.

Sometimes it was a mistake in the original, sometimes the typesetter made a mistake. Sometimes the writer just disagreed with how it should be written, and sometimes even the typesetters who couldn't speak English made choices to change it

No one gave a fuck about accuracy, it was about pumping out as many books as possible. Because just owning a book was a huge status symbol still from when they were handwritten and crazy expensive.

But all those books eventually got read, and the people who learned to read them were very proud that they could read. So they insisted that all the random bullshit was intentional and had to be followed to a T by everyone forever.

Most other languages had a noble class who kept it sensical, but for a long ass time only peasants spoke English, the wealthy in England all spoke French, cuz they were French.

Anyways, that's why English doesn't make any sense. There was also a natural thing happening where vowel pronunciation was changing. So when the typecasters solidified everything, it was already in a state of flux. That's why pronunciation doesn't line up with spelling.

The primary accent for 2-syllable words that are used as both a noun and a verb depends on the part of speech. The noun places the primary accent on the 1st syllable, the verb on the 2nd syllable.

Examples:
The musician records a record.
The farmer produces produce.
You're not permitted to fish without a permit.

Welcome to english, where rules are actually the exceptions

"Read" and "readed."

Where, were, we're. Even native speakers have problems with this. I don't know how many times I had to correct such cases, especially with American authors.

English has way more vowel sounds than it has vowels.

• jack
• barn
• arena
• ball
• able
• rare

Those are just words where the primary vowel letter is "a".

The terrible attempt to solve this is by using double letters, but then consistency goes out the window. There's times when "ea" is a single vowel sound like /rid/ (reed) or /rɛd/ (red). But it can also be /ɛrn/ as in earn, which rhymes with urn and burn. It can be /ˈɡɹeɪt/ as in great, where the "ea" is a diphthong and pronounced like the "a" in grate or vague. Or, for more fun, the two letters can each fully get their own pronunciation like "react" or "theatre".

We're really at the "bearn it all down and start over" stage with English. Let's just all agree to switch to español.

Present: read

Past: red (in the fediverse), redd (on the old site)

Obvious.

"Read" is spelled s-a-m-e? English is a weird language.

Lead and lead as well. I got a lead on those lead undergarments you wanted. I'll lead you there later.

I found it! https://www.exocomics.com/193/

On a different note there is Reading, a football club in UK, which is pronounced "Redding". This pronunciation is akin to the Reading Railroad from Monopoly (which I mispronounced all my life until today).

Little details, picked up along the way.

The digraph oo is pronounced at least six different ways:

• boot, proof, boost, scoop, moon
• book, foot, look, cookie, good
• floor, poor, door, moor
• flood, blood
• zoology, cooperative
• brooch (just brooch; there doesn't seem to be any other word in the whole language using this sound for oo).

Reed and Red

Reed, red. Homophones should be homographs too.

The English language is so retarded yet we use it for international communication, and it is too late to stop it.

How about we go with reed and red... see, you already know how to pronounce them!

I've never been a fan of read/read/red They're too popular to all be comingled like that.

Just place read/read with Peruse/Perused

Wind as in air moving and wind as in a pathway with twists and turns.

The comedic timing of this strip is actually really good.

Read and readed