One of the young ArGees sent this to me.
I TAKE IT YOU ALREADY KNOW
I take it you already know
Of touch and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead; it’s said like bed, not bead;
For goodness sake, don’t call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat,
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother.
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there,
And dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there’s dose and rose and lose-
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword.
And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Why, man alive,
I’d learned to talk it when I was five.
And yet to read, the more I tried,
I hadn’t learned it at fifty-five.
I don’t mind continuums where things are really, really different. Those where things are only slightly off-kilter really mess with my head. This one is exactly like the last one, except you all have the 9 on the left side of an analog clock face.
Talk about a rough start to the morning.
There’s one continuum where the analog clock face is a line, not a circle. They don’t talk about history repeating - time is always moving forward in their thinking. It’s kind of neat, really.
Misspelled word in the second line, (or typo).
"Touch" should be "tough".
.
(It always has been for me, anyway!)