Wordplay

[pecunium]

If you don't subscribe to World Wide Words (a weekly e-zine on the English Language), why not?

This week there was a piece of heterography e.g. spelling fish as ghoti

So, for those of you who don't subscribe, try putting this one into it's normal spelling.

GHOUGHPHTHEIGHTTEEAU

By way of a hint, I'll tell you that the first substitution requires using a British English phoneme.

Good luck.

Comments

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

It looks as though it might be "potato"?

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Dead on.

TK

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I hadn't subscribed, for the obvious reason that I hadn't known about it. (You do get Anu Garg's word-a-day and Dr. Mardy's weekly quotes ezines, don't you? Both are admirable, though not remarkably profound.)

I was almost resigned to not getting this one -- the confirmation response is limited to two characters (OK) ... and I've not been able to prevent my ISP from including a (brief) advertisement in every message they send for me, so the ListServer rejected it.

But the following day I had an email from the List Owner asking if there had been a problem. I explained, and he added my @ from his end. (We're dealing with our kind of person, here.)

As I understand it, the ListServe instructions are hardwired, but the work-around seems to be to respond, if you think you might have this problem, with:

OK
END

which apparently causes anything following in the message to be ignored. (Presumably, net-savvy people are already aware of things like this, but on the net -- as, increasingly, in most aspects of the world -- it's no longer possible to rely on A Body of Common Knowledge.)