I before E except after C, or when sounded as "a," as in neighbor and weigh. Or eight, freight. Notice that there are silent letters, which should immediately alert you to the oddity of spelling. And there are many exceptions to this anyway.
It's entirely arbitrary. There is no reason it can't be recieve or cieling. Many of these conventions come from French copyists and then typesetters centuries ago, who were trying to capture sounds in a consistent fashion. We spell such things "correctly" purely as a social signifier that we have received a proper education. I had a great aunt who congratulated a preacher with great approval that she had never heard him split an infinitive. Not splitting an infinitive is just a made-up rule, like many rules of English. It is supposedly superior to say "It is I" instead of "It's me," but French, significantly closer to Latin, has c'est moi and no one bats an eyelash. It's usually an affectation. I found it easy to adopt this affectation and have found it difficult to rid myself of it, which says something about snobbery and reverse snobbery, I suppose.
I competed with a highschool girlfriend every morning as to who could memorise the most decimal places of pi. I forget who won, but we were both over 250. I can still rattle off 3.14159265358979 but...why? Few Almost zero computations require that level of precision. We were working with protractor and compass in 1971, and the imprecision of those instruments made anything beyond 3.14 pointless.
I posted on "Nukular" over three years ago and it generated one of my longer comment threads. There are words that we associate with being sloppy or ill-educated that are more clearly examples of how a prestige accent has won out in English. In most languages the accent near the capital becomes preferred and everyone in the provinces is looked down upon. My sons from Transylvania remember being teased by the children and staff at the orphanage in Oradea when they came down from a rural village an hour away.
There are times when it is worth being precise, but most of our pedantries communicate unattractive things about our character.
Sometimes a usage makes me grind my teeth--such as claiming that Einstein found that everything was relative. I am tempted to practice pedantry with a 2x4.
ReplyDeleteSometimes, among friends, apparently pedantic remarks are no more meaningful than comments on the weather; just something to keep the conversation going.
I read an interesting article a couple of years ago where a NASA mechanic said that they didn't need to take pi to more than 4 decimal places for any reason since the delta was so small as to be negligible after that even over enormous distances (parsecs).
ReplyDeleteWell, the delta isn't that tiny: if you want to hit Olympus Mons (radius 187mi) on Mars (O(140E6 mi)), that's 1 part in a million, or 5 decimal places. OTOH, I assume the initial rocket direction isn't that good and they have to adjust direction along the way anyhow.
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