green and pleasant

[stuck]

From the top of the hill.

Ken

[HansV]

Lovely summer landscape!

[StuartR]

Lovely

[stuck]

It was a lovely summer walk, except the last bit where...

Spoiler

the river was weird

IMG_1147-48_stitch_4web.jpg

Ken

[StuartR]

Is it just low on water?

[BobH]

So . . . weird or weired, eh?

[jstevens]

Spoiler

Is it a dam?

[stuck]

It's the weir on the River Derwent at Kirkham Abbey. Apparently it was built in the 1700s on the site of an early weir of unknown date.

Ken

[ChrisGreaves]

So . . . weird or weired, eh?

weird
Cheers
Chris

[John Gray]

It's the weir on the River Derwent at Kirkham Abbey. Apparently it was built in the 1700s on the site of an early weir of unknown date.

So - twice weired!

[ChrisGreaves]

So - twice weired!

Or, perhaps, weired for the therd time?
P.S. How does a perfectly innocuous post of a pleasant image of a Sunday afternoon stroll pivot on one of the few words in English which violates the rule "i before e, except after c", and then go on to include the word innocuous?
Cheers
chris

[HansV]

As a foreigner at leisure, I would like to inveigle you to realize that this rule is either the height of folly, or else one shouldn't put so much weight on it. Is it a heinous crime to seize a beige heifer? There's a lot more in this vein...

[ChrisGreaves]

As a foreigner at leisure, I would like to inveigle you to realize that this rule is either the height of folly, or else one shouldn't put so much weight on it. Is it a heinous crime to seize a beige heifer? There's a lot more in this vein...

very good, Hans!

Now try these: agreeing, albeit, atheist, atheists, beige, being, beings, caffeine, canoeing, canoeists, deign, deigned, eight, eighteen, eighth, eighths, eighties, eighty, either, eyeing, feign, feigned, fleeing, foreign, foreigners, forfeited, freeing, freight, freighted, freighter, freighting, height, heightened, heightening, heights, herein, kaleidoscope, leisurely, lightweight, neighborhood, neighborhoods, neighboring, neighbors, neither, outweigh, outweighed, overseeing, overweight, protein, pureeing, refereeing, reigning, reigns, reimbursed, reimbursements, reimburses, reincarnation, reinforced, reinforcements, reinforces, reinforcing, reining, reinstall, reinstalling, reinstate, reinterpret, reintroduce, reinvigorated, reissued, reweighed, seeing, seigneurs, seiner, seize, seized, seizes, seizing, seizures, shoeing, sightseeing, sleighs, sleight, sleights, surfeit, surveillance, their, theirs, therein, unveiled, veil, veiling, veils, vein, veins, weighed, weighing, weighs, weight, weighted, weighting, weights, weird, weirdo, wherein.

I want a full report on my desk at nine o'clock tomorrow morning

Managerialy
Chris

[Leif]

Aren't you missing someone, Chris?

[GeoffW]

With a surname of Whitfield, I'm glad I wasn't included in Chris's list.

Old MacDonald however both conforms to and deviates from the rule.

[stuck]

..the rule "i before e, except after c"...

The thing is, that rule is invariably misquoted, as exemplified by Chris. It's still not perfect but it does considerably reduce the number of exceptions if you state the rule in full:
    "i before e except after c, if the sound is 'ee' "

Including the extra clause handles words like deign and eight where the sound is not 'ee' but 'ay' (as in bay / hay). Similarly height and sleight, where the sound is not 'ee' but 'eye' (as in buy / try). OK so it doesn't cope with weird, where the sound is 'ee' but that's because it is weird.

Ken

[ChrisGreaves]

Aren't you missing someone, Chris?

Oh Leif, darling, I never knew you cared ...
I have a confession to make: For purposes related to Kevin Stroud's excellent History of English Podcast I collected all 14,000+ DOCuments on my data drive and from them extracted a list of 20,000+ unique words-strings (must contain a vowel, composed only of lower-case alphabetics from the Roman alphabet, etc) and use that lexicon as a base for discovery.
For example I can search for begins/contains/ends with a string and locate all words (in my private lexicon) that match a linguistic rule mentioned by Kevin. Episode 100: Decoding English was my starting-point.
It is by this means easy to locate all word-strings that harbour "ei" and eliminate those that contain "cei".
I am currently looking at the origins of our ("my"!) two-letter words, such as "Hi!". Kevin has already covered "me/my".
Cheers
Chris

[ChrisGreaves]

... if you state the rule in full:     "i before e except after c, if the sound is 'ee' "

Thank you, Ken. I had not hear of that expanded form of the rule.

From the get-go on this little hobby I have longed for a means of measuring "sounds like".
I essayed with various Soundex-like schemes, and went through Word(2003)'s "sounds like (English)" in the Edit,Find dialogue box with no real success. A great many of Kevin's rules need a sound, and not only because, as Kevin points out, "this IS an audio book".
The attached summary gives an indication of the importance of sound in linguistics, and why the spoken language (the vox populi) drives the changes in a language that the written form cannot rein in.
Cheers
Chris

[Leif]

Oh Chris, (dahling), and anyone else interested...

My name is pronounced the Norwegian way, as if it was spelled 'Lafe', rhyming with 'safe'. However, my Danish stepmother calls me 'Life' because that's the way the Danes say it. Or so I am told...

[ChrisGreaves]

With a surname of Whitfield, I'm glad I wasn't included in Chris's list.

Hi Geoff.
I miss you too!
As I replied to Leif, in amassing my Lexicon I discounted capitalised words altogether, reasoning that they were either proper nouns (as in "he is a proper Whitfield, you know!" ) or else they had made an appearance at the start of a sentence - in which case they would probably turn up as lower-case in this or some other document.

Old MacDonald however both conforms to and deviates from the rule.

OK. I am lost. Do you know something about - OH! Now I get it!! eieio!!! Very good
Cheers
Chris