The I Before E Deceit Unveiled


(In sympathy with Elise, who thinks spelling is worse than torture because it doesn't make any sense at all.)

The apparent perversity of English spelling is occasionally tamed by a simple rule. For example, I remember learning the famous poem:

I before E,
Except after C.

It didn't take too long for this rule to run into trouble, and I next had to learn the "revised" version:

I before E,
Except after C,
Or when sounded like A,
As in "neighbor" and "weigh".

But just when we fancied that spelling had become a science, a prescient foreign geisha woman named Deirdre Oppenheimer came down from the heights of a glacier, tore off her veil, seized an ancient financier, and shamed our consciences grievously. "This society is inefficient!", she inveighed. "I wasted my leisure becoming proficient in cuneiform hieroglyphs. Either reimburse me with the value of the Einstein coefficient, or I will drag this man back to my hacienda in Muncie, wherein he will forfeit his life!"

I feigned interest, but looked for our feisty concierge Neil, whom I might inveigle into reining in this weird being. But he had gone to Anaheim, Beijing, Madeira and Taipei with Alexei to shop for a beige geiger counter. His absenteeism made me feel like queueing for the exit. The only sound was the neighing of the sheik's eight reindeer, chewing their edelweiss.

I turned to Sheila, the Budweiser heiress. "Cease your surveillance of the sleigh and its freight! We must stop the reign of this plebeian atheist!" I must have hit a vein, because she deigned to put down her counterfeit kaleidoscope proficiently, albeit only to point out a weird Klein bottle full of nucleic proteins. "Therein is the skein of meiosis," she said, "the leitmotif of our species, of seismic importance to our homogeneity. It would surfeit a meistersinger, a sovereign, or even an omniscient deity like Poseidon."

Decreeing my obeisance, I offered the paperweight, a Meisterbrau stein, and a Holstein heifer to the heister. Agreeing that it was sufficient, she reinstated the old wisenheimer, fleeing with spontaneity via Boeing to Beirut.

CIE words:

        agencies
        ancient
        coefficient
        concierge
        conscience
        deficient
        efficient
        fancied
        financier
        glacier
        hacienda
        Lucie
        Marcie
        mercies
        Muncie
        omniscient
        policies
        prescient
        proficient
        science
        society
        species
        sufficient
        tenancies
      

EI words:

        absenteeism
        ageism
        albeit
        Alexei
        Alzheimer
        Anaheim
        atheist
        beige
        being
        Beijing
        Beirut
        Boeing
        Budweiser
        caffeine
        codeine
        counterfeit
        cuneiform
        deign
        Deirdre
        edelweiss
        eider
        eight
        Einstein
        either
        Fahrenheit
        feign
        feint
        feisty
        foreign
        forfeit
        freight
        geiger counter
        geisha
        heifer
        height
        heinous
        heir
        heist
        herein
        Holstein
        homogeneity
        Hygeia
        inveigh
        inveigle
        kaleidoscope
        Keith
        Klein
        Leicester
        leishmaniasis
        leisure
        leitmotif
        Madeira
        meiosis
        monteith
        neigh
        Neil
        neither
        nonpareil
        nuclei
        nucleic
        obeisance
        onomatopoeic
        Oppenheimer
        plebeian
        Pleiades
        poltergeist
        protein
        queueing
        reimburse
        rein
        reindeer
        reinstate
        reinvent
        reitbok
        seismic
        seize
        sheik
        Sheila
        skein
        sleigh
        sovereign
        surfeit
        surveillance
        Taipei
        their
        theism
        veil
        vein
        weigh
        weir
        weird
        wisenheimer
        zein
        zeitgeist
      


Last modified on 04 May 2006.