Definitely. “Thru” has been used on hiway (notice what I did there?) signs for decades, along with ‘hiway.’ I don’t know of any accidents happening because people were confused.
These alternate spellings are done purposely, not accidentally. Anyone who sees that and thinks they’re a sign of childishness or illiteracy are themselves being the petulant child here as they willfully embrace ignorance of intent to protect the integrity of spelling! (BTW, English spelling has all the integrity of a mob informant – protecting that is such a good cause!)
Sure, you can disagree with specific attempts at alternate spellings (also known as ‘abbreviations’ in some cases), but name-calling and pathetic attempts at social humiliation for “not getting it ‘right’” are the signs of grammar nazism.
I have to agree. The “ough” combination really is a cumbersome mess, and the English language would be better off if we eliminated it. Remember, it was only in about the last century or so that spelling became standardized, so it’s not like we’d be overturning eons of linguistic history.
That’s awesome. I was trying to pronounce “through” with the “ough” from “enough” - “th-ruff?” I should use ough as a nick and see people talk about it - “have you met ooh?” “No, but there’s this intelligent guy, arf”
I don’t see how a serious scheme of spelling revision could now prevail against the sheer mass of written material generated in that century.
Unless it was a huge and expensive effort, it would take another century to reach a practical level of ubiquity, by which time:
a)All the people who wanted it to happen would be dead.
b)It would probably be just as wrong as at present, because dialects will have continued to drift.
“draught” is only one vowel off from “drought”, so having never knowingly heard “draught” spoken aloud, I had no context to suggest that it was pronounced so differently from “drought”.
I had seen the word “draught” in print numerous times, mostly in English literature, and it was always used as a noun: “The doctor gave him a draught of elixir…” “He quenched his thirst with a draught of water…”, etc. Meanwhile, aside from “the Draft” to describe involuntary military conscription, or somebody complaining that “there’s a draft in here — did somebody leave a window open?”, I’d usually seen “draft” used as an adjective: draft beer, draft horses, etc.
And it just now occurred to me that, all those times we saw a character in “Peanuts” yelling “AAAAUUUUUGGGH!” in frustration, we should have been pronouncing it “FFFFFFFFFFFFFFF…!” like in one of those “rage comics”
And while we’re at it, can we get some work done on publicising the fact that the past tense of pay is not “payed”? I’m pretty sick of seeing that one, too.
