This is what happens when I'm off the psychotropics of Trumpism

This morning, after catching up on Trumpism's very latest monstrosities, barbarities, and calamities, I began wondering which of the multitudes I might write about. Then I realized I simply could not stomach another hour devoted to anything Trump. I was spent. It wasn't yet 10 a.m. and the thought of writing more about His Scabrous Rotundity was just too painful.

But somewhere in the agony I had the pleasure of running across a new word: rhoticity. Turned out, we Americans use it, the Scots, the Irish, even Canadians use it. The English, New Zealanders and Australians do not. We unhappy few in the New World have used it for more than four centuries. Roughly 200 years ago, the English stopped using it.

What is it that rhoticity users use? The long-r sound; the hard r in sister and brother. The earliest North American rhoticiters brought it from England. Back home, decades later, lower- and middle-class rhoticiters began killing it softly — sis-tuh, bro-thuh — because they wanted to sound like the aristocratic English, who had become anti-rhoticiters to set themselves yet further apart from the common and lowborn.

The blue bloods got punked. Even the subliterates of East London thugs were soon sounding a bit like Nigel Farage, only much smarter.

The linguistic r gap between Yanks and Brits is akin to the transatlantic stretch from our harsh short-a sound to their gently landing a as in ah-sound. It’s also bewildering. We pronounce the a in bath as we do the a in cat. Their bath is bahth. But we don’t say father as we do rather. So we should say rather like rahther or father as in Cotton or Jerry Mather.

Doing more injury to innocent little a, we pronounce lake, bake, and make as we do only because, like the useless little appendix we were born with, dangling from lake and all lake-like words is the unarticulated, utterly useless e as in eee. Any reasonable level of linguistic consistency would demand that we say lakeee.

Then there's bought as in fahther, plus bought sounds nothing like aghast.

Also bewildering to me is how immigrants to the U.S. — there were such people, once — ever learn to read English with any proficiency. Bernard Shaw was beyond bewildered. So moved was the Irish playwright by the language's wretched spelling "system," he proposed the creation of a new alphabet. No more Latin letters.

He went on to fund a design competition (held a few years after his death). The contest had hundreds of entrants; the winner was one Ronald Kingsley Read, a professional sign artist.

Opinions vary.

Take that and you get this.

Or, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."

I may withdraw my complaints.

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Cross-posted in Substack.