17
Aug
2003

ENGLISH: A DREADFUL LANGUAGE

Someone sent this to me, knowing I love this kind of stuff, and I’ve decided to use it in next month’s AWC newsletter. If anyone tracks down the actual author, I’d be very grateful. 🙂

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, tough and through;
Well done! And how you wish perhaps
To learn 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
Nor 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 word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart.
Come, come I’ve hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Man alive
I mastered it when I was five.

-Author Unknown

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