I try not to be much of a pedant regarding such matters, and I am far from perfect regarding proper spelling – especially when tired – however just to vent one teensy-weensy pet peeve:
Hypothesis: The old adage of ‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’ is overused, misleading, and may in fact be practically useless.
Let’s put this one to bed with a little experiment; the first two word-searches are supported by “I before E except after C”.
- I before E after non-C
egrep -i ‘[^c]ie’ /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l = 3697 words
- E before I after C
egrep -i ‘cei’ /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l = 156 words
…and the latter by the opposite of the above adage:
E before I after non-C
egrep -i ‘[^c]ei’ /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l = 2447 words
I before E after C
egrep -i ‘cie’ /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l = 257 words
The respective pairs of numbers are of the same magnitude; if it were significant to do the maths then we could argue that 51% more words (3700ish) are in favour of the adage than against it (2450ish) – but were I were a betting man, I would not like those odds.
Three-to-two in favour smells like a hung verdict to me.
Amongst the words which go against the rule and I often encounter misspelled, are:
- deign
- deity
- heiress
- heirloom
- seize
- vein – people give up on this one and just misuse vain, but worst of all comes:
- weird
Why do so many people have problems with “weird”? Strangely I rarely encounter being or feisty, height or (pointedly) weight misspelled. “Weird” is only a stone’s throw away from the latter.
For those who want to nitpick, the provenance of the dictionary in this experiment is the MacOS X v10.3.9 wordlist, which comes with the following note:
Welcome to web2 (Webster’s Second International) all 234,936 words worth. The 1934 copyright has elapsed, according to the supplier. […] The wordlist makes a dandy ‘grep’ victim.
…so it’s an old Webster which I therefore believe is adequate for the needs of this posting.
Anyway – I’m off to bed. Enjoy. HTH. HAND.
Leave a Reply