I’ve been thinking about words a lot. I happened across a book of Macbeth (with its title set in Helvetica, of course) and started thinking about how the English language seems to be out to get us. It doesn’t care who gets taken down in the process, either.

One of the strangest words I’ve seen is prophesy. It means to give a prophecy? Yep. Looks like prophecy, right? Of course. So it should be pronounced the same? Wrong!

Prophesy is a hard word to justify, since its very meaning has been usurped by the highly ambitious prophesize, but the mentality behind it isn’t that stupid. Well, for the bedraggled collection of words which we call English, in any case.

To put it simply, words which, as a noun, use a C, usually turn this into an S in the verb form. The most prominent example of this is advice, which changes to to advise in the verb. There is another, albeit little-known, example: practice goes to to practise.

Another example of the constant vindication is the divide between affect and effect. The noun of both is effect. Why? The world hates you. Yes, the two verbs have subtly different meanings, but for what reason? Could you just not use a different word, for goodness’ sake?

Spelling hates you and me, apparently. How rude.