I just remember that it’s a 3-syllable word, not a 2-syllable like a lot of people pronounce it.
The -re ending is more logical and consistent, unless you plan to start using the meteric system, or get all theaterical on me.
Oscar Wilde didn’t go to jail. He went to Reading Gaol, not Reading Jail. Jail is definitely an American term.
Only if you are an ancient mariner.
Or ‘bidness’ 
Yeah, that one always looked strange to me as a kid.
Same with marriage and carriage. I used to always used to write ‘carraige’ and ‘marraige’ in school. :o
One that doesn’t seem right
queue
I never understood that ‘innocent’ was pronounced with a soft c for decades.
innosent - thats what it shoud be.
One word that never seems right when hand written - ‘guard’, sometimes I have to try it out a few times on scrap paper before using it.
…and while I’m at it,
Yacht - wtf is that word? it does not seem to fit in with anything at all.
That actually helps me in the work I’m supposed to be doing right now. Here I thought I was screwing around, and it turns out I’m doing vital research!
This may be a matter of common pronunciation changing. Consider how “continuum” is pronounced–“vacuum” was probably “vac-you-um” until the barbarians got ahold of it.
I really hate the whole affect/effect thing. If something affects something else, it has an effect on it, but the words are pronounced the same. So people say, if it’s a verb it’s affect. Except that’s not always true–to effect change, for instance. Here the word has a different meaning, but not that much different. Even people who understand the rules have to really stop and think about it each time and that’s jus tstupid.
Principal and principle – same rant.
They’re the same term, just with two different spellings. And it’s my impression that in the U.K., “jail” is now the more common spelling.
Remembering how to pronounce Ralph Fiennes gives me a substantive amount of agita.
The principal is your pal.
I actually find that mnemonic useful. First, it underscores that a principal
can be a person whereas a principle cannot. Secondly, it brings to mind that a principal is the main official of a school and as such is short for principal educator. From there it’s easy to see which word is used when.
That’s funny–the c-e combination is virtually always a soft c. (Well, in English. You wouldn’t happen to be a native speaker of Latin or Elvish?)
And speaking of Latin and Elvish…
Who else was angry at Tolkien for sneaking the always-hard c rule into an appendix at the end of RotK? Of course, it’s ignored by most, but for conscientious geek kids like me, it was quite the “oh, crap” moment when we got the third volume from the library and descended on the “words and names” appendix with glee, only to find out that the pronunciations in our heads were very, very wrong.
Well, yeah, then it turns into a shibboleth for true obsessives, but sheesh.
singular PENNY plural PENNIES
singular MONKEY plural MONKEYS
The film title 12 Monkeys always looked wrong to me. I kept thinking it should be Monkies. Why isn’t it?
I too was vexed by this. I am much less a writer than the Perfesser, of course. But in creating my fictional language for my fantasy novel, the very second thing I decided was to almost-completely ignore the letter c, as it is inherently ambiguous to an English user. The voiceless velar plosive is always k; the voiceless alveolar fricative is always s. C appears only in ch.
That said, I totally stole the dh thing. I stole it and I’m not giving it back.
Y only becomes ie when pluralized if the preceding letter is a consonant.
One try; two tries. One
One turkey; two turkeys.
Don’t know, but what makes it even worse is that the plural of MONEY is MONIES.
English is a screwed-up language.
My picks:
Sacrilege/sacrilegious: Totally nonintuitive. Seems like it ought to be “sacreligious.”
Liquefy: It’s a liquId, so why isn’t it “liquify”?
Palimpsest: I just hate that word. I hate words with lots of P’s in them (pump, pimp, plump, pimple, etc.)
Ineresting. I’ve never heard that rule before.
Is it? That would appear to break Skald’s rule.
According to the online dictionary, either monies or moneys is correct.
This might well be true, but I’ve never seen it spelled “moneys.” Seems like it ought to be, though.
How many times must I tell you people to stop bothering me with facts! Facts are but a crutch for people who lack [del]hulring axes[/del] the courage to enforce their wills upon on others!
The consonant thing is what I was always taught in school and what I taught in my brief, ill-thought-out teaching career. But there’s always exceptions.
The dh thing actually makes phonetic sense, too. Tin:thin :: den:then/dhen.
Why can’t it really be like this?
its, in the sense of ‘belonging to it’. Why doesn’t it have a possessive apostrophe?