The English Language

THIS IS A LONG POST BUT REALLY FUN INFORMATION, TRUST ME. AT LEAST I THINK SO.

I am taking a literacy class this last summer block and I am loving it! I am really hoping I can use what I learn to help Spence, Trey (if Kristen would like me to) and Reeb learn how to read; as well as the many kids I shall one day teach. I have been practicing literacy testing with some children, testing their writing skills, spelling skills, phonological awareness and reading skills (using the QRI). I then interpret those test results and write a report. Sounds fancy, huh? Now I have moved on to tutoring sessions, which so far are a disaster, but hopefully will get better. So, this post is dedicated to all things WORDS. Really, it's enjoyable. Please read on.

Before I go into the letter "K", I'm going to ask you a question that I will answer at the end of the post, so you have time to think about it. This is another spelling for a common word. Can you figure out what word it is?

ghoti (think hard about it...)

Kevin Cummings, of the Shortcomings Audio podcast, writes,

I had my first comedy hit with the phrase “itty-bitty kidneys.” Of course, the audience was my eight-month-old son, so it wasn’t much of a hit, but every time I uttered those magic words he’d laugh until he couldn’t breathe. Similar phrases (including “itty-bitty fingers,” “itty-bitty toes,” and the rarely amusing “itty-bitty latissimus dorsi”) never had the same comic effect. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was employing some powerful tools for verbal comedy.

Words with the ‘k’ sound--like ‘kidneys’--are inherently funny.

The humor potential of the letter ‘k’ has been part of comic lore for years. In the Neil Simon play The Sunshine Boys, the character Willy explains it to his nephew: “Fifty-seven years in this business, you learn a few things. You know what words are funny and which words are not funny. Alka Seltzer is funny. You say "Alka Seltzer," you get a laugh . . . Words with "k" in them are funny. Casey Stengel, that's a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny.”

So the names Squiggly and Aardvark both have great comedy potential because they both contain the ‘k’ sound. It masquerades as a ‘qu’ in Squiggly and it lurks at the end of Aardvark.

Scientist and researcher Richard Wiseman put the ‘k is funny’ theory to the test during his LaughLab research in 2001. Although the main focus of the research was finding the funniest joke, Wiseman also performed a “mini-experiment” to see if the letter ‘k’ actually gets more laughs.

The experiment was built around a simple joke:

There were two cows in a field. One said, “Moo.” The other one said, “I was going to say that.”

During the experiment, people were invited to visit the LaughLab website and rate jokes pulled at random from a database. In addition to the cow joke, Wiseman and his colleagues put several variations in the database including mice that went “eek,” tigers that said “grrr,” and birds going “cheep.” The winning variation which had the most ''k's was this joke:

There were two ducks on a pond. One said, “Quack” and the other said, “I was going to say that.”

There are other verbal techniques you can use to elicit a chuckle including Alliteration, Assonance and Consonance. Honestly, I stole this from a podcast which talks more about the rest. Look up "Grammar Girls Quick and Dirty Tips: Episode 112" to listen to the rest. It is probably my second favorite podcast I listen to.

Now, to answer the question posed at the beginning of this post: What common word could be spelled "Ghoti" in our mixed up language that is English?

Well, Ghoti could just as well spell fish. In " ghoti," the sound of gh is the one found in enough; the o is the sound found in women, and the ti is the sound in the middle of nation. We discussed this in my literacy class and I found it very interesting. It is truly a weird, sometimes nonsensical language I speak. A lot of Americans complain that people come to this country and don't learn the language. Well, no wonder; It's hard!

In all honesty, I want nothing more than to continue to talk about the English language and/or learning to read, but this is probably going to be the longest blog post ever, so I shall stop. I hope you enjoyed it though and don't want to punch my face in for wasting your time.