spell it out 4 CH One

Note I say ‘apparently in such a mess’.English spelling isn’t as bad as most people think it is. They describe it as ‘chaotic’,‘inconsistent’, ‘irregular’, and ‘unpredictable’, ‘unlearnable’. Thomas Sheridan, the 18th-century elocutionist, went so far as to say that the state of our spelling system is worse than ‘the darkest hieroglyphics or most difficult ciphers which the art of man has hitherto invented’. The impressionis fuelled by writers who have gone out of their way to draw attention to theirregularities. 

A famous example dates from the middle of the 19th century, and came to be associated in the 20th century with George Bernard Shaw: ghoti is said to spell fish, because f is spelled gh as in cough, i is spelled o as in women, and sh is spelled ti as in nation. This is complete naughtiness. The spelling ti is NEVER used with this sound at the end of a word in English, and the spelling gh is NEVER used with this sound at the beginning of a word. But people have been taken in by this sort of nonsense. And the feeling that English spelling is a mess has been reinforced by the clever creations based on irregular forms, such as ‘Though the rough cough and hiccough plough me through, I ought to cross the lough.’ All good fun, but hugely misleading as a summary of the English spelling system. It’s a bit like listing eight accident blackspots in a country, and saying all the roads are like that.