Rick's b.log - entry 2026/02/01

Today's inspiration

Pourquoi 2 n pour tunnel et un seul pour canal?

The short answer: English spelling is a mess.

The slightly longer answer: It is because of stress. We say tunnel with the stress at the beginning of the word, and the double-n marks this, while it is canal with the stress at the end.
Why does a double-n mark the stress? 🤷 Often, but not always, a short stressed vowel followed by a consonant has the consonant doubled, like in tunnel, whereas if the stress is elsewhere it's a single consonant.

Get used to the shrug emoji, it's pretty much the entire vibe of the English language. There are actual reasons for a lot of the weirdness, but reasons lost to time and a total reticence to want to fix anything.

The longer answer?

Hold on tight, there are no seatbelts and we will be going upside down. Let's skewer the English language!

English: A Perfectly Good Language Ruined by History, Americans, and Printing Presses

It is an accumulation of unresolved pull requests going back about a thousand years, most of which were merged without review and never documented. In other words, it is a language built out of linguistic cruft.

Native speakers rarely notice any of this. Foreign learners notice immediately and assume, perfectly reasonably, that someone is playing a prank on them.

English is what happens when you never refactor

Where other languages periodically stop and look at themselves in the mirror and say "Dude, this is getting silly, let's tidy up", English barrels onward clutching tightly on to every spelling, pronunciation, and punctuation mark it has ever acquired. Nothing is deleted. Nothing is deprecated. Some things change over time (like the Flintstones having "a gay old time") and once in a while we'll steal somebody else's word if we like the sound of it, or smash two innocent words together to make something new, but the core of the language doesn't adapt, it just bolts this stuff onto the side and carries on regardless. If languages had mass, English would have an Event Horizon.

The result is a language that functions remarkably well provided you already know it and appears completely unhinged to everyone else.

As said above, most languages periodically tidy themselves up. They simplify spelling, standardise pronunciation, and politely escort obsolete features out the door. For example in 1990 l'Académie française tidied up some dusty corners of the language (read more on Wikipedia). Right now you'll find stuff written in two Chineses: Traditional and Simplified.
What does English have? We don't have any central authority overseeing the language, we just have dictionaries arguing with each other about the finer points of a language that's a pathological hoarder.

Silent letters? Keep them.
Multiple pronunciations? Add more, why not?
Spelling based on sounds that vanished in 1475? Absolutely essential, removing them would destroy the essence of the language irrecoverably.

English spelling is not phonetic, or even logical.
It is historical, which is a polite way of saying the ghosts are still in charge.

At school we're taught 'i' before 'e' except after 'c' - well, you might want to tell the science teacher that.

English is a language built from borrowed parts (none of which match)

Vikings dropped by and left Norse vocabulary lying around. Then the Normans arrived, installed French as the language of power for centuries, and permanently split English vocabulary into plain and fancy versions of the same idea - ask vs enquire, kingly vs royal, freedom vs liberty (and, note, while these are synonyms there are subtle differences "because"). Later still, Latin and Greek were hauled in to make science, medicine, and law look more respectable. And every so often, words were intentionally mutilated to make them appear more like Latin.

Each of these languages came with its own spelling habits and pronunciation assumptions, and English accepted all of them without harmonisation. There was no committee. There was no grand unifying theory. Words simply entered the language and English just shrugged and said "whatever".

This is why English spelling is not a system or a method, it is a collection of broken pieces smushed together.

Spelling is archaeology, not an instruction

Silent letters are the most visible evidence of this. The k and gh in knight, the s in island, the b in debt ... these are not mistakes so much as fossils. Sounds that vanished centuries ago, ancient pretentiousness, or simply mistakes.
Occasionally, letters were added not because they were ever pronounced, but because someone thought the word looked insufficiently Latin. Debt gained its silent b to hint at debitum. Island acquired its silent s through a mistaken association with insula. These errors were then printed, copied, taught, and made permanent.
And knight, way back in the annals of time, was said something like kuh-nig-t, maybe it was onomatopoeic?

Either way, English does not correct mistakes. It canonises them: This word is now in use and it forever shall be like this.

Context is everything

I read the lead record on the wind-up device while the wind was strong.

To a native speaker, this sentence is unremarkable. Somewhat contrived, and were lead records even a thing? And if not, what could be more metal than an actual metal record? But, whatever, the meaning is perfectly clear: It was windy, there was a disc made of metal atop a device intended for playing it, and you looked at what the disc said.

A learner, on the other hand, quietly reassesses their life choices. Do they really really need to know this crazy language?

Let's see: Read, past tense so it is pronounced like "red". Lead is the metal, so it's said like "led". Record is a noun, an object, so the stress is at the beginning. Wind-up comes from "wind" so it rhymes with "find". And Wind is a current of air so it rhymes with "pinned".

Exactly and precisely nothing in the spelling indicates any of this. English simply assumes you will infer it correctly from context, world knowledge, habit, or stunning guesswork. If you do, the sentence flows. If you don't, the sentence collapses into noise.

Worse yet, this is not a bug. This is core design philosophy.

I'll drop in one last well-known context example.

I saw her duck.

Did you see her lower her head? Or did you see her bird?

Native English speakers will figure it out from context. Learners will simply segfault, then crank open another Red Bull while side-eyeing Mandarin Made Easy! sitting on the bookshelf unread.

Stress, the invisible switcheroo

A record is a thing - whoo, Leonard Cohen's greatest hits...
To record is an action - I'll watch this programme tonight if I have the time.

A present is an object - thank you, I do enjoy a good doughnut.
To present is a process - I think you did a good job explaining that.

Native speakers perform these shifts unconsciously, without ever being taught the rules.
Learners, meanwhile, are left wondering why the same word appears to change when spoken aloud and why nobody warned them this would happen; and how the same word can have so many weird meanings.

A contract is an agreement that you sign.
To contract means to get smaller, or maybe just catch a disease.

English does not label any of this, it just expects you to know it.

Stress in speech

English, by contrast, is stress timed. This is why it is possible to tell French and English speakers apart even if you can't hear what they are saying - the entire intonation of the language is different.

He said she should be there at ten.

Or to drop in the stresses:

He said she should be there at ten.

You'll notice that it seems to be a regular stress-unstressed pattern until the end where "there at" gets stuffed into the same space as "said". This is completely normal in English, the stresses fall at regular intervals and everything in between speeds up or slows down so it fits.
Thus, English simply sounds different.

Actively hostile spelling

Consider blood, food, and good. Same spelling pattern. Three different vowel sounds (or maybe two depending on your accent). Or one, done, and gone, which appear to rhyme in theory and stubbornly refuse to do so in reality (though the first two may depending on accent). Or how about the irregular woman becoming women (and not "womans"), where the plural form manages to change both vowels, to the same sound no less, while leaving the consonants untouched. Seriously, how is it that "woman" pluralises to "women" and is said like "wimmin"?

These are not weird exceptions to rules. They are survivors of the way some things used to sound but don't any more, changes that affected some words but not others, leaving modern English as a mess that must simply be memorised. Yay you.

English rewards familiarity, not logic. Logic need not apply, unless you're happy learning about The Great Vowel Shift and the etymologies of thousands of words.
But few people care, because there's already enough to know without adding all of the "why". This is probably why English dumped the concept of word genders. Can you imagine trying to remember how to correctly say a word like refrigerator (and why does that shorten down to "fridge", where did that 'd' come from?) whilst also having to remember if it's a masculine word or a feminine one?

Not that this gender thing is even necessarily consistent...you're definitely going to be having second thoughts about learning English, especially when it comes to saying the word "thought". Which is pensamiento in Spanish, pensiero in Italian, and pensamento in Portuguese. All masculine. Even in German, Gedanke is masculine.
And in French? The feminine word pensée, just like the Swedish tanke.
Just to prove that other languages like messing with foreigners too. Just look at Danish!

Punctuation: Late and inconsistent

So, over time, punctuation was invented and pressed into service as a grammatical tool, but without ever being fully standardised. Commas, in particular, now perform a bewildering array of jobs: separating clauses, marking lists, disambiguating meaning, signalling rhythm, and starting arguments on the internet.

And let's just gloss right over the apostrophe. If you're not an English teacher or university educated (and maybe if you are), you have probably used this thing incorrectly - especially if you think that the genitive (relationship) is the possessive (ownership). Or you're a grocer. Grocer's never get apostrophe's correct, do they?

Speaking of presses, sometimes words had extra letters thrown in to better line up the print. This is how ghost ended up with an 'h'.
No, really, the old English gæst became the Middle English gost and when William Caxton introduced the printing press to England in 1476, he brought with him some Flemish typesetters who added in a few Flemish conventions to make the words "look better". Since then, English has been stuck with ghost (and aghast, ghastly...).

A brief but necessary digression into American spelling and punctuation

Punctuation received similar treatment. American style insists that commas and full stops belong inside quotation marks, regardless of whether they are logically part of the quoted material.
Thus:

British English: He said "stop".

American English: He said "stop."

To an American, the American version is aesthetic-first. The punctuation is pulled inside to make the text look neat, even if it slightly lies about what was actually said. This choice is now tradition, defended vigorously, and impossible to change.
From a British perspective, it's not just wrong, it is utterly illogical. The quote goes into the quotation marks, sentence structure does not, end of discussion.

Even better, in British English you could write: "What the hell are you doing?"
You could also write it like: "What the hell are you doing?".
The double punctuation at the end is not wrong, just uncommon.

English, you will notice, is very good at making decisions permanent. And followers of such decisions will vehemently defend their interpretation as being The One True Way and everything else is just plain wrong. I clearly think American punctuation is idiotic. I'm sure an American reading this would be like "Gosh darn, did you drop out at grade school or something?".

Why native speakers don't notice the chaos

This is because native speakers do not learn English as a system of rules. They acquire it as a web of patterns, long before they even have the language to describe what they are doing. Pronunciations, stresses, and irregular forms are absorbed whole, without analysis. You can read more about language acquisition.

A native speaker does not think about why read changes pronunciation, or why women sounds the way it does. It simply is. It's always been that way for them. The irregularity is familiarity.

How we got to this state

They preserve old pronunciations, old prestige markers, old mistakes, and old compromises. They preserve invasions, printing errors, scholarly affectations, pompous gits, and regional habits. They preserve everything except the idea that maybe, just maybe, this could have been made simpler at some point. The Americans tried, and instead created a similar-but-different fork that is great material for internet arguments and yet another headache for learners.

English works not because it is elegant, but because it is flexible, expressive, and deeply tolerant of inconsistency. And like all such systems, it is powerful, infuriating, and held together by shared intuition and the collective decision not to touch anything too much in case it makes a bad situation worse.

When English is running on vibes

No, let's look purely at the language here.

One of English's greatest talents is its absolute delight in just sticking words together and seeing what happens. There is no authority to apply to, no approval process, no permission required. If two words bump into each other often enough, English will happily weld them into a new unit of meaning and send them out into the world, and people will just infer what these things mean.

Take hyperlink. On its own, hyper is a vague promise of excess or speed, and link is a perfectly sensible noun. Together, they become a very specific thing that didn't exist before the web did. No new root words were required. No classical language was consulted. English simply said "this will do nicely, thank you" and this is a hyperlink...but most of us just say "link" because it's less of a mouthful.

This works because English treats words less like sacred objects and more like Lego^® bricks. Nouns become adjectives. Verbs become nouns. Entire phrases get compressed into compounds that feel obvious five minutes after they're coined: laptop, smartphone, firewall, breadcrumb. None of these required permission, they just needed to be useful and for people to actually use them. Then they became words.

Other languages tend to ask whether a compound is allowed within the grammatical structure of the language. English simply asks "does this make sense?" and if so, job done.

Cromulent, for example, is a word that was made up for an episode of The Simpsons, a word meaning that something is merely satisfactory, adequate but not exceptional. Given that there wasn't actually a specific word in the English language for this, it was itself a perfectly cromulent word, and it now features in major dictionaries such as Collins and I believe it's in the OED but that's paywalled these days.

The magical power of "-ed"

She was trolleyed.
He was plastered.

At no point does English explain why a trolley or plaster are involved. The entire thing is emotional, not logical. The "-ed" suffix transforms the word into a state you have entered: usually one involving alcohol, poor decisions, and how did you even get home anyway?

What's remarkable is how productive this is. Almost any solid object or action can be pressed into service: hammered, smashed, wrecked...

Native speakers instantly recognise the pattern, even if they've never heard the exact word before. English has created a template for drunkenness, and it will accept new submissions indefinitely. This is not something English teaches. It is something English expects you to feel.

Creative Insults

Cockwomble
Sockpuppet
Wankbiscuit
Spannerbrain

None of these require looking in a dictionary to figure out what is being said. Their power lies entirely in their vibes, not in their semantics.

English insults often work by pairing a bodily or mildly rude term, and something faintly ridiculous or harmless; such as "wank", a colloquial term for masturbation, and "biscuit", a small baked object dunked into tea. There's no meaningful relationship between the two words, which is why it works so well.

The result is an insult that is sharp without being overly explicit, colourful without being precise, and oh so deeply satisfying to say aloud.
You are not accusing someone of a specific failing; you are declaring them to be a kind of creature. An utter cockwomble.

English is particularly good at this because it has a vast vocabulary of concrete nouns, extremely weak rules about what can modify what, and a cultural fondness for metaphor over explanation.

In short, the insult doesn't have to make sense. It simply has to land...you titgrinder. 🤣

Why this even works

English speakers are comfortable operating in a fog of vaguely referenced implication:

• This word probably means that
• That suffix suggests a state
• Those two words together feel right

This is why English is such a joy to play with, even as it remains an absolute nightmare to learn. The rules are loose, the edges are leaky, and creativity is rewarded far more often than correctness.

All the dusty corners

Phrasal verbs

• to give up (stop)
• to give in (surrender)
• to give out (distribute)
• to give out (fail)
• to give off (emit, usually something suspicious)
• to give away (donate)
• to give away (accidentally reveal)

To a native speaker this is just second nature. These phrases have emotional meaning, you can't treat them literally. For learners, it's an exercise in sadism.

English could have used Latinate single verbs (abandon, emit, relinquish). Instead, it kept the phrasal versions around because they feel more immediate, more spoken, more alive. And once again, it is vibe over elegance or logic.

Verbifying nouns

• to Google something
• to chair a meeting
• to bottle it (or bottle out)
• to shoulder responsibility

English just shrugs, takes the word, treats it as a verb, says: "You know what I mean". And you do.

Fake politeness and weaponised understatement

• That's interesting → this is utterly wrong and I've just quietly rent your soul asunder
• Not ideal → it is a disaster
• I've seen better → this is terrible
• We might want to revisit this → it's bollocks and you know it
• With respect... → brace yourself, I'm not going to hold back
• It's a bit nippy → the snow is falling sideways
• You might want to have a look at this → this may be a career/company ending mistake and you ought to be aware of it
• I wouldn't exactly recommend it → avoid at all costs
• Whenever you have a minute → NOW and not a second later
• I'll bear that in mind → I've already forgotten, but don't ever ask this again
• We'll see → Somewhere between "no" and "absolutely not"
• No harm done → you've ruined everything
• Could be worse → This is not optimism: said after disasters, catastrophes, and elections
• Could we consider some other options → this idea stinks more than rancid cheese
• It's a bit dear → holy crap you'd need a mortgage to buy this
• Sorry, is anyone sitting here? → you have three seconds to move your bag before I welly it across the room
• Not to worry → I will never forget this, and neither will my children
• That's certainly one way of looking at it → what the f--- is wrong with you?
• Marvellous. → oh, bloody hell

English is very good at sounding calm while communicating doom. It's a form of wordplay that can be traced back as far as Beowulf.
British understatement relies on shared assumptions and that everyone present understands the scale of what is not being said. The power lies in restraint. To overstate is to lose control, whereas to understate is to demonstrate it.

This style developed in a culture that prizes composure, irony, and the ability to endure discomfort without making a scene (that infamous stiff upper lip), which is a perfect match for a language already full of implication, double meanings, and unspoken rules.

To learners and some foreigners, this can feel highly deceptive. To natives, it feels merciful.

And to AIs and LLMs, it can often be badly misinterpreted because British people will be polite and use phrases like those shown above, which if taken literally will have the exact opposite meaning to that which was intended.

"Get"

• get a thing (obtain a thing)
• get somewhere (arrive somewhere)
• get someone (understand someone)
• get sick (become unwell)
• get something done (cause it to be completed)
• get over something (recover from something)

This single verb quietly does the work of half a dozen others, depending entirely on context. The past tense is got, you may run into gotten and have got and we're still arguing over those last two so don't wade into that maelstrom.

Sorry is the hardest word

• Sorry? (please repeat)
• Sorry! (I acknowledge your presence)
• I'm sorry you feel that way. (not an apology)
• Sorry about that. (I noticed, but I'm moving on)
• Sorry if I offended you. (no, I'm not)
• Sorry but you can't sit there. (read the sign you idiot)
• Sorry, what? (say it again, I dare you...)

The word sorry does a lot of work while remaining semantically vague. It is less an admission of fault and more a social lubricant, deployed liberally. Do not assume sincerity until you understand the subtext.

Opinionated onomatopoeia

• clang
• squelch
• plonk
• thud
• splutter

These words don't just describe sounds; they are evaluations - something that plonks is already considered ridiculous. A thing that squelches is beyond saving. English uses sound words to smuggle in attitude and judgement.

The obscenity toolkit

Few languages allow quite this level of grammatical profanity gymnastics. Every language has swear words, usually describing body parts or functions. But in French you can't say something like J'en ai absolu-merde-ment marre! whereas this sort of construct is valid in English. They don't, of course, teach you that at school.

Precisely imprecise

For instance, "go get me the thing" (beat) "no, not that thing, the other thing" (actual instruction given to me by mom).
"stuff", a word I use a lot to save having to remember what stuff is called.
"or something", vague sentence ending.

Or, of course, you can be painfully exact and sound like you're reading lawyerese.

This makes English ideal for diplomacy, storytelling, programming documentation, passive aggression, and pretending you know what you're talking about - these categories may overlap. Greatly.

The paradox of English

But at the same time, English is astonishingly generative. It lets you invent, compress, imply, euphemise, and insult with a freedom that few other languages permit without extensive paperwork and raised eyebrows.

English may be a mess, but it's a mess that lets you do things. You can coin a word at breakfast, use it by lunch, and hear it on the internet by dinner. And if it works, English won't ask where it came from. It will just keep it.

That's where memes came from. Which is a cromulent word to describe a picture with an often horrifically misspelled and/or grammatically catastrophic caption that is supposed to convey some sort of humour but frequently misses.

AI because ain't no way I'm driving to Paris in this weather...

This article was far longer than I intended, but the weather was naff and it was cold so I wrapped up in a heated blanket and sat down to destroy my native language, and then pat the burning embers on the head. I hope you enjoyed this excursion into the chaos that is the English language.

Your comments:

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It's not that I don't want to hear from my British friends, it's because your country makes stupid laws.
 
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jgh, 1st February 2026, 20:34

"center" annoys me because it breaks the stem.  center  centeral  centeric  vs  centre  central  centric    He said she should be there at ten.  *He* said she should be there at ten.  He *said* she should be there at ten.  He said *she* should be there at ten.  He said she *should* be there at ten.  You can get 181440 meanings out of that sentence.

jgh, 1st February 2026, 21:07

I've managed to get two entries into the OED.    remantle: opp. dismantle, "You can be sure that if they offically dismantle it, there will be an unofficial remantling." Macroscope, Piers Anthony, 1969 and earlier.    nouveau middle-class: those who have quickly or suddenly entered the middle class from a lower social backgound, but who live and behave not in a manner that would be described as middle class, but in a manner that they believe is what is middle class. Typified by Bob Ferris in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? and the characters in the play Abigail's Party. cf nouveau riche.

David Pilling, 2nd February 2026, 17:09

I read it as "leed" record, as in the first record. Good post, well written. AI seems to write English well. Presumeably it has digested a lot of examples and remembered them, unlike me.

David Pilling, 2nd February 2026, 18:05

Hyperlinks did exist before the web. Hypertext existed. Tragically I learnt about hypertext from a book in the 80s. Seemingly someone thought up hypertext in 1945 thinking about microfilm - nowt new...

jgh, 2nd February 2026, 21:07

Yes, I did something "hypertext" with an RMNimbus during work experience in 1985.

Rob, 5th February 2026, 12:56

i had several points to make, but they are already convered by other comments. So just to add a phrase I heard once in all seriousness:  F-ing F-ers F-ing F-ed.

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