confidential to klwalton

[serene]

Me, on the bus this morning, barely under my breath: "No, it *doesn't*,
you idiot!"

(I'm reading The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, by
Bill Bryson, and I got to this paragraph about how spelling changes in
different ways from the changes in pronunciation:

The matter of the vanishing u from forty is more
problematic. Chaucer spelled it with a u, as indeed did most
people until the end of the seventeenth century, and some for half a
century or so after that. But then, as if by universal decree, it just
quietly vanished. No one seems to have remarked on it at the time.
Bernstein suggests [in Dos, Don'ts and Maybes of English Usage,
page 87] that it may have reflected a slight change in pronunciation -- to
this day many people aspirate four and forty in slightly
different ways -- but this begs the question of why the pronunciation
changed for the first word and not for the second.

)