Eye before whatever, except after sometimes
My brain lacks the circuits and neurotransmitters necessary to make spelling English words as easy for me as it seems to be for others. Plus, I was an early guinea pig* for the failed educational experiment called phonetic spelling. In higher grades, like fifth grade, the professional educators in my life tried to correct the error by shifting to a rule-based pedagogical modality.
The rule “I before E except after C” was something I could get my head around, so thereafter for a long time I applied the rule ruthlessly, with sometimes weird results.
This morning I ran across the word “weinie” in print, and I figure it has to be a mistake. Great post on the weinie
A few minutes Google research teaches me that weinie, wienie, weeney, weenie, and weeny are each acceptable spellings for the word, even if a few spell checkers are behind the curve. I shall not delve into the word’s various quite different meanings and connotations.
Naturally, my first impulse was to spell it “weenee”, illustrating one of the many soft spots in the phonetic spelling method.
* Guinea Pig:
“Guinea Pigs are small, furry animals originally from South America and are very large rodents. In the wild they move around in groups and eat grass but most Guinea Pigs are pets.”
Guinea pigs are not from Guinea nor are they pigs. Mostly, however, I’m curious to see how Google deals with the statistical improbability of the prose in this post.
