Spelling obsessives will be familiar with the nineteenth-century joke suggesting that ‘fish’ should really be spelt ‘ghoti’: the ‘gh’ is pronounced ‘f’, as in ‘cough’; the ‘o’ is pronounced ‘i’, as in ‘women’; the ‘ti’ is pronounced ‘sh’, as in ‘nation’. Entertaining as the joke is, it is essentially cobblers, as David Crystal explains in this masterly book. You’d never use ‘ti’ to sound like ‘sh’ at the end of a word; and ‘gh’ is never pronounced ‘f’ at the beginning of one.

Literary Review

Sep 2012

Categories

Harry Mount

Instead of a Book

Playing Away

Lava Palaver

Making Yourself At Home

Court Lore

Kindled Spirits

‘Gay But Not Screaming’

Set In Stone?

Roundly Acknowledged

Oh What A Lovely Pile

Delusions of Originality

It Came, It Saw, It Conquered

Those Irritating Lefties

Why Ask If Shad Do It?

TV’s Socrates

Slumming It

Keeping Out the Joneses

Sublime to the Ridiculous

Esprit de Corpse

Stateside Sniping