![]() The “closet” meaning dates to the mid-1500s, and the "p" and "b" of the spelling have long since merged in pronunciation. Pronunciation: \KLAB-erd\ play & \KUB-erd\ playĬupboard literally is a “cup board”: that is, a board or table on which cups can be stored-at least at its origins in the Middle Ages. Najwa Bin Shatwan, Michigan Quarterly Review, Spring 2022 He was a rotund man with a thick beard, stern features, and sunglasses that contributed to his intimidating demeanor as evening descended on the city, thus making the sunglasses appear unnecessary. I knocked on the door and entered the office of Colonel Hamid, the official in charge of criminal investigations in Benghazi. ![]() Luckily for French speakers, the French later also altered their pronunciation, and today pronounce the \l\, but English speakers stubbornly kept the original \r\ and suffer the consequences still. (Substituting l's for r's, and vice versa, is something that languages sometimes do to each other's words.) The word came to English from French in the mid-1500s, but by the mid-1600s, the etymologically “correct” (but by now confusing) spelling colonel was adopted in both French and English. The French took the word colonnello from Italian-it comes from the word for “column,” and it referred to the leader of a column of soldiers-but the French altered the spelling to coronel. The lack of agreement between spelling and pronunciation in this word (defined as "a military officer who ranks above a major") can be blamed on some noble, but ultimately unhelpful, intentions. This is a list of some words that frequently get mispronounced-because English is hard. One result of the confusing and often counterintuitive nature of English spelling is that it affects pronunciation: when a word’s spelling doesn’t relate in an obvious way to the way it’s pronounced, the word is apt to be pronounced incorrectly. The state of English spelling is partly due to the mongrel nature of the language (it’s essentially a product of Anglo-Saxon aka Old English, Latin, Old Norse, and Anglo-French), and partly a consequence of longevity English is more than a thousand years old and languages are inherently vulnerable to the vagaries of time. ![]() A word like lachrymose helps us justify our spelling bees (which, incidentally, are nearly unique to the United States), while millions of children (and adults too!) each day look at Wednesday and wonder: why? It asks us to accept the inconsistences of has and was, do and go, and to resign ourselves to the logic-defying set of “ough” words, like bough, bought, tough, though, and through.
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