Roger O Green

A is for ai, ay, eigh

I have noticed that there are a lot of ei or eigh words that have homonyms – words spelled alike but sound differently that DO have a more instinctive spelling.

Someone, responding to a previous blogpost in which I suggested that English could be a tricky language to learn, disagreed with me; he thought it was quite easy. Unfortunately, I don’t know what his native language was; perhaps if it were Chinese, with all of those symbols and differing pitches, that might be the case. Maybe my thinking comes from being in the midst of trying to help the Daughter with her spelling homework each week that I find it rather challenging to explain WHY certain words are spelled as they are.

For instance, one rule she’s learned is: “When two vowels go awalking, the first one does the talking.” Well, yeah, that’s quite true, except when it isn’t.

Take the sound of the long A: One of the reasons why children have so many spelling problems is because of their shaky knowledge of how to spell many of our long-vowel words.

The big problem with long vowels is that there is more than one way to spell the same sound. For example, long a can be spelled simply a as in apron, agent or April; or a-consonant-e, as in ate, page, or fame; or ai as in rain, waif, or maid; or ay as in day, gray, or play; or ei as in vein or rein; or eigh, as in eight or weight. Notice that in ei and eigh, there is not an a in sight. I imagine the French influence on the language is responsible.

Of course, local pronunciation may render a long A into a short A such as the potayto/potahto tomayto/tomahto issue, well documented in the Gershwin song Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off (version by Louis ARMSTRONG and Ella Fitzgerald).

Common Spellings of the Long A Sound.

If one considers ai, ay and a-consonant-silent e as standard, then I have noticed that there are a lot of ei or eigh words that have homonyms – words spelled alike but sound differently that DO have a more instinctive spelling, such as

aweigh-away
deign-Dane
eight-ate
feint-faint
heir-air
lei-lay
neigh-nay
reign/rein-rain
sleigh-slay
vein-vain/vane
veil-vale
weigh-way

Now, the EI sound DOES show up in another convention: “I before E except after C or when the sound is AY as in neighbor and weigh.” Also not as true as it might be.

So I have a question for you, especially, but not limited to the non-native speakers. What aspect of the English language did/do you find most difficult in terms of pronunciation and spelling?
***
We remember The Fonz most from giving a single or double thumbs up while saying his signature catchphrase “Aaaaayee!”

ABC Wednesday – Round 8

The Quick 2010 Fandom Meme

“If St Elsewhere exists only within Tommy Westphall’s mind, then so does every other series set within the same fictional sphere.”

Since I’ve found myself unable to create any Best Of for the year, I guess I’ll force myself to do this meme from Sunday Stealing instead. Only requires one response per question required.

1. Your main fandom of the year: tossup between the perennial Beatles and visiting the folks at ABC Wednesday.

2. Your favorite Film this year: The King’s Speech, though I was mighty fond of Toy Story 3. And BTW, I went with my wife, not my daughter; the conveyor belt scene would have freaked her out, I’m guessing.

3. Your favorite Book read this year: well, haven’t read it as such, but I am thoroughly picking out stories and descriptions from Finishing the Hat by Stephen Sondheim.

4. Your favorite Album or Song this year: probably National Ransom by Elvis Costello.

5. Your favorite meme site of the year: other than ABC Wednesday, that’d be Rock ‘n’ Roll Fridays, I guess.

6. Your Fandom that you haven’t tried Yet, but want to: not applicable

7. Your best new Fandom Discovery of the Year: also n/a

8. Your biggest Fandom Disappointment of the Year: too many 3-D movies that don’t warrant the technology, and the added ticket price. Ken Levine talked about this recently, and Roger Ebert is virulently anti-3D.

9. Your TV Boyfriend of the year: n/a

10. Your TV Girlfriend of the year: I suppose it’s Lauren Graham, whose presence in the show Parenthood got me to watch it occasionally.

11. Your most Missed Old Fandom: don’t know if I miss it as much as it has nostalgic resonance, but a lot of online fandom was stuff that USED to happen by mail. I did a little of that re the BEATLES maybe 20 years ago.

12. Your Biggest Anticipations of the New Year: that 3-D movies as a selling point will crash and burn.

13. Your favorite post (of yours) of the year: difficult to choose. Probably an ABC Wednesday post. I’ll pick L is for Loving Day because it generated lots of comments.

14.Your favorite new blog (to you) of the year: Peripheral Perceptions. Don’t always agree with Lisa, but I do respect her opinion.

15.Your favorite new website of the year: Well, it’s new to me – Tommy Westphall’s Mind: “If St Elsewhere exists only within Tommy Westphall’s mind, then so does every other series set within the same fictional sphere.”

16. Your favorite news story of the year: the Chilean miners’ rescue.

17. Your favorite actor of the year: Colin Firth. I liked him in the last two movies I’ve seen him in, The King’s Speech and A Single Man.

18. Your favorite drama TV show of the year: Based on the time from recording to the time I watch it, it must be The Closer.

19. Your favorite comedy TV Show this year: Using the same criterion, Modern Family.

20. Your favorite cartoon of the year: Pearls Before Swine newspaper strip.

Musings

I’ve found myself unable to create any Best Of for the year.

I was reading Tegan’s blog a couple of weeks ago. She was telling this really interesting story about some friend of hers who had purchased an e-book for his Kindle or Nook or whatever and wanted to lend the book to his wife. But because of the DRM restriction, he was unable to. Then Tegan found for him a, let’s say, non-standard copy of the book. The act of obtaining the pirated copy may have been – OK, almost certainly was – a legal wrong, but Tegan categorized it as a moral right; I found myself agreeing with her assessment.

I know I’ve done similar things for the greater good. The only example that comes to mind involves the purchase of marijuana for a friend’s uncle who was on chemo. This was – the statute of limitations has run out, I’ll put it that way.

Which always brings me back to Dickens: Sometimes, at least, “The law is a ass.”

I always notice when people put the wrong word in an article, such as it’s for its, or effect for affect. I’m not talking typos, I’m talking errors. I’ll admit that, in the past, I might have thought less of that writer. But in a blog post by a very intelligent friend of mine, he used it’s when he meant it’s several times. I wrote to him about this privately, and he replied, “My dear old grammar died when I was very young so I never learned proper punctuation.” I was charmed enough to let it pass.

I’ve found myself unable to create any Best Of lists for the year, best of the music I bought, or movies I’ve seen, for a couple of reasons. 1) I just didn’t buy that much music or see that many movies, and of those I listen to or see, many predated 2010. But, moreover, 2) I’ve lost that ability to remember what music I even bought this year. I wouldn’t know about the movies if I didn’t blog about them. It appears I’ve lost the ability to think about life in 12-month segments.
***
When Governor Cuomo (that’d be Andrew, not his father Mario) was giving his State off the State address earlier this month, I was live Facebooking. It was fun. It could be addictive. I’m not likely to do it again any time soon, for that very reason!

When To Retire QUESTION

Firing the debate is Dylan’s “status as the ultimate music icon, the caretaker of a body of work that, many would agree, stands in contrast to his current sound.”

For some of us, when to retire is dictated by the policies of our companies, our governments, or perhaps, our health, possibly tied to the amount of our nest egg.

But for some, in the fields of music and sports, e.g., when it’s not always that clear. There’s a new movie called The Fighter, which I saw on New Year’s Eve, about a middling boxer who wonders if he should hang up his gloves, or stay in the ring.

In real life Brett Favre, an NFL quarterback has retired for the last three years; this year’s proclamation, playing on a losing team, seemingly will stick.

But I was most intrigued by an article in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago called When to Leave the Stage, which is about a “generation of music icons…hitting retirement age, along with their baby-boomer fans.” Writer John Jurgensen targeted one particular performer: “Is it time for Bob Dylan to hang up his hat and harmonica?”

“Why single out Mr. Dylan when Judy Collins and other graying veterans are out there touring unmolested? Firing the debate is his status as the ultimate music icon, the caretaker of a body of work that, many would agree, stands in contrast to his current sound. He’s also got a touring schedule that would put some hungry young acts to shame. He’s been doing roughly 100 gigs, year in, year out, since 1988…

“Casual fans, especially, are vexed by Mr. Dylan’s ongoing habit of mutating his most familiar songs.” The latter I know to be true from seeing Dylan myself a couple of years ago, and being totally unable to recognize some of his most famous works.

But should he retire? I contend that he’ll retire when people stop buying tickets to see him and/or stop buying his records; some of his best albums have come out in the past 15 years. So I say no – let the market decide. I had had opportunities to see artists such as Sly Stone and James Brown perform, and I declined, despite loving their music, because their erratic behavior at their concerts had become legendary.

What thinkest thou?

Getting All Post-Racial with MLK, Jr.

Everything I’ve read, all of his speeches I’ve devoured, suggests that MLK would still be in the fight for equal justice, not convinced that we’ve already gotten there.

Since the King holiday is coming up, I thought I’d mention that noise I’ve been reading about Martin Luther King, Jr. being a Republican. This involved posters over the past couple of years and his niece declaring it to be so. Frankly, I have not come across a totally credible source proving it one way or another.

The Republican party, of course, was the party of Lincoln, while the Democratic Party, particularly in the South, where King lived, was the party of George Wallace and other segregationists. So it is quite plausible that he was a member of the GOP, at least until the 1960 election of John Kennedy. Surely he voted for Democrat Lyndon Johnson over Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964, his public comments make clear.

But most of the conversations miss the greater point, which is, “Would Martin Luther King, Jr. be a Republican in the 21st Century?” Those who suggest that the answer would be “yes” generally zero in on one section of his March on Washington I Have A Dream speech in August 1963, the part that goes: I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. The clear implication is that race-based remedies for past or current discrimination should be off the table.

But read the very end of the speech:

from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men, and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

So the real question becomes this: would MLK think Americans are equally free in these days? Or would he think the increasing economic disparity between the rich and the poor needed to be addressed? Would he fret over unequal access to food, shelter, health care? Would he weep over the resegregation of education?

Obviously, I don’t know for certain. But everything I’ve read, all of his speeches I’ve devoured, suggests that MLK would still be in the fight for equal justice, not convinced that we’ve already gotten there. A big issue in his latter days involved a disproportional number of black soldiers fighting and dying in a war he considered unjust. The garbage collectors fight that brought him to Memphis just before his death was as much about economic disparity as it was about race.

I’m a Census guy. Many people tell me they wish we’d stop measuring race. Why is it that the government still counts people in that way, other than the historic reasons? The government measures race and ethnicity in part to delineate equality or disparity in income, housing, and the like. Maybe we’ll stop counting race when we stop being unequal. I really do hope we get there someday.
***
SamuraiFrog shares Glenn Beck taking back civil rights from MAD magazine.