Things that make you go ermmmm......

[Slooow_Jo]

If science is based on fact & prove, how come it goes against the old english 'knowledge' of i before e.............

[Slooow_Jo]

Ice maiden!!!! you worry me now lol

[Ice.Maiden]

Pardon me - but you DID say to mention some places. : (

[Slooow_Jo]

ice maiden I'm just stunned at how close you have got!!! after all we are talking about a city lol put my username before hotmail.co.uk if you want to talk more xx

[jake-the-peg]

Well if you don't like the illogical spelling - lets change it

There's no such thing as right and wrong in spelling anyway. It's just what is sufficiently common to qualify for common usage.

Americans have lots of different spellings, not right or wrong it's just different.

Take the pronounciation of the letter H as Haitch - so often people look down their noses at that here but it's common usage in Ireland (known as the Hibernian [h]aitch)

We could start a movenet for logical English spelling - I doubt it'd catch on though any morre than Esperanto did. Language has a tendency to want to evolve naturally and in unexpected directions

[jake-the-peg]

Personally I hate it when asked they are someone responds "I'm good"

But I dare say there were those who deplored the loss of Thee and Thou too. ( They probably set up a small resistance community in Yorkshire)

The only reason you hate that is because you were brought up to distinguish a difference between Learn and Teach.

It's possible that that distinction might fade away in the same way that "whom" is now becoming archaic.

[chakka35]

One of the reasons why English is so easy to learn is that it is not encumbered with all those complications concerning the gender of nouns whereby adjectives and articles have to "agree" with the noun in gender and number and so on. Oddly, English seems to be the only language free of this unnecessary encumbrance, though there may be others that I don't know of.

I know that English is easy to learn because I know quite a lot of quite small children who speak it fluently...

[realaleman]

Just discovered this question so sorry I'm a bit late.

Surely the expression to remember is
I before E except after C, which fits science perfectly. You still have to look out for the exceptions of course!

[realaleman]

Please ignore my recent answer, obviously having a senior moment since I have not been to the pub today!
Yes it makes you go "errrrm" , so I think the first answer was about the best.