by Nina Narlock

Venturing out once again into things I observe in daily life: My oldest child is beginning to learn the basics of phonics and how to sound out words. We’re a family who loves to read, so learning to read by oneself is a topic of great interest to my little girl.

I can’t count the times I’ve had to ask her to skip over some words and move on to another word in order to maintain the phonetic lesson on which we were learning. (Did you see how I avoided ending that sentence in a preposition?)

When phonics is working, toddlers can read words like fin, bin, tin, and win with no hiccups. I mean Dr. Seuss himself made a few impactful books (okay, a TON) simply based on the rules of phonics doing their thing and helping tiny tots learn to read! Sound it out! Just change the beginning sound, and you can read all the aforementioned words.

Enter other origins that English has borrowed for some of its words…

ROUGH

DOUGH

COUGH

THROUGH

The previous four words all end in the same four letters, but have completely different sounds! I have no idea how these things came to be except that they did.

As an editor, I’m just here to uphold the (ever-changing) laws of English. Some laws are unbending, but others are up for debate if its use can be justified. For example, consider the informal faux pas (pronounced foe-pah, a French word we borrowed, literally meaning misstep and figuratively meaning an embarrassing or tactless action) of ending a sentence with a preposition! Example:

We skipped the lesson we were on.

Should be:

We skipped the lesson on which we were learning.

Disagree with that rule?

You’re in good company. Winston Churchill famously snubbed that rule by saying, “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.”