Mnemonic plague
Apr 13th, 2008 by handolio
I’ve had this post on the back burner for a while, because I planned to fill it with examples as they occured to me. As I was adding the third, I thought to look on Wikipedia which has plenty, so now I can put this thing to bed.
You see, I have to confess to a problem with ie and ei. I reckon I get them the right way round something like 98% of the time, but the remaining 2% is, frankly, embarrassing.
One thing I’ve long suspected to be at the root of my problem is that the rule “i before e, except after c” is fucking useless. Checking on Wikipedia, I’m rather reassured to see that this is in fact the case, and I will now stop giving myself a hard time over it.
In the meantime, I present to you the three words that I had so far identified as wrong’uns, i-before-e-wise: height, weird and leisure.
For some reason that puts me in mind of the mile-high club, pretty much guaranteeing that from now on I’ll remember how they’re spelled.
In my school the saying went “‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’. Except in exceptions.”
Which isn’t so much fucking useless as a total joke.