Wednesday, February 13, 2008

What's with the "i before e" rule?

Has anyone else noticed that this neat little spelling limerick is almost completeley bogus?

"'I' before 'e' except after c."

Yeah right. What about their, weird, protein, deity, heir, height, weight, veil, or species?

Forget evolution, the misguided school boards of the bible belt need to work on getting this hoax out of our schools. Mr. J, I demand that you never teach it to your students.

Brian Regan actually has a great bit on this. All I could find was this kid's cartoon, it's still good though. Give it a gander.

2 comments:

MisterJ said...

All rules in the English language depend upon what country the word comes from.

I don't teach my students that rule, because I have an Einstein poster in my room, and it's wrong in his name twice.

But I do quote the Brian Regan version quite frequently.

Nick Sidwell said...

Log,
The rule actually says "except..." in it and states there are words like 'neighbor' and 'weigh' that can graciously break this rule. Most of us only remember the 1st part becasue that was all our juvenile minds could muster to save after all these years. Thanks to Sarah, I now know there is a lot more to those mnemonic songs than what I remember.

My hop is to speek apropratly and leeve spel- checking to Microsof.
"Pick your battles", I guess.