Tuesday during the nightly news the weatherguru used the word trough as in "elongated region of low atmospheric pressure. " My ear caught the word and I realized that for all of my life I have mispronounced trough. I usually hear, and say, troth, instead of troff. Probably as a child learning the word a th ending was what I heard and learned and the word is sufficiently mushy that I never heard my mistake. It is debatable whether I'll be motivated to re-learn it at this point in my life.
Puzzling over the word during one of those "Why am I still awake" moments in the middle of the night I thought about the letters OUGH and wondered how I could have spent all these years with OUGH being OTH. The incongruous ways it *is* pronounced yielded an answer:
cough - aw
though - oh
through - oo
tough - uff
hiccough - up (yeah, some say hick coff, but the dictionary allows for hiccup spelled this way)
lough - ock
bough - ow
We actually learn to slosh our way into and out of a sentence like:
A tough chough on a bough beside the lough made a rough cough through the trough, though a hiccough ought to be enough.
Obviously OUGH can be wrestled to the ground and used to spell anything. Trough = true? Or trow? Bend a little and it could be truck. How do we ever manage this language?
1 comments:
Until she was in her late thirties my mother, a well read woman, thought there were two words spelled "misled". One was led the wrong way and the other was sort of thouroughly confused as in "mizzled".
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