Sandra Dodd

I’ve brought you something to ponder, or to guess.

I’ve long had a page on spelling, http://sandradodd.com/spelling
In a discussion on the order that adjectives go in English (something I never knew at all until this year, and I loved English, studied it, taught it, wrote all the time), an article was brought that dicussed that AND something about spelling.

Here’s the puzzler, the riddle. It’s another thing I didn’t know. Hadn’t even really thought about!


There are nearly 1000 English words with "ie" or "ei." Make a guess or estimate at how many of each there are.

Did you come up with two numbers? Divide nearly-1000 into two piles.
Think about how you're deciding this. :-)


http://sandradodd.com/spellingie

Those on facebook might already have come across this where it is in the trivia group, so I thought I would bring it to a new audience. :-)

Sandra

nacho katy

Ooh...spelling and grammar! I read a funny little blurb about this earlier this year. I love the jingle in there -quite a mouthful. 


And, I especially like his “conclusion.”

My daughter uses quite a bit of invented spelling, and I always find it fascinating how her spelling makes such sense! I also find when asked how to spell words, how silly the correct spellings sometimes are. Even simple words, like do and love, and all the exceptions to the rules I remember being taught.

A funny anecdote:
When my nephew was young, my brother watched some sort of PBS type program which stated, “when two vowels go a-walking, the first one does the talking.” He called me in a tirade of how that’s just not true, and the example he kept using was boat. He just kept saying over and over that then you could spell boat, boet or boit or bout, and that’s NOT TRUE!! (His emphasis!)