How do I stir up the Cambridge Philosophy budget scoffers?

I have found a potential signature-

If women had intelligence men would lie prostrate.

Any good?

Lola:-

And men aren't are they?

When will this occur Lola? And, if I may, who will be there?

I would love to join you. Where will this meeting be held?

Lola:-

Sounds like you are trying to say-"amuse me I'm bored."

I have all sorts of stuff backed up for your amusement but when you vanish it gets a bit lost as the present overwhelmes it.I have a psycholinguistic analysis of a movie I saw with five dykes in the starring roles.That's quite good in a scoffing sort of way.

I had a new experience.A geyser in the pub told me a joke he didn't get himself.Have you ever heard of a thing like that before?

He said,as we slumped on the bar in desultory moping mode-

"spendius-how do you spell FISH?"

So I said,knowing better than to try any fancy footwork with that sort of thing-
"Eff Aye Ess Aitch".
The clunk said-
"No-it's Gee Aitch Oh Tee Aye".
I knew I was supposed to say "how do you work that out?" so,not being awkward as I'm not,I said-
"How do you work that out?"
He said-
"Gee Aitch as in enough,Oh as in women and Tee Aye as in caution."
Well I really laughed.And he was pleased at my doing so and he laughed and so did Vic who is my intellectual sparring partner.
The next night I told fatso how good I thought his parable was about the FISH.
"Parable spendi?" he queried.
That's when I knew he hadn't got the joke he had told.
When I decoded it for him as "Enough Women! CAUTION" he looked like he might be about to do something indiscreet.Well-indiscreet on the bar I mean.

[]

/quote]

Don't know it, but I'll look. The verses (particularly) and lyrics to songs from the '30s & '40s were often both beautiful and little noticed. Even some more recent ones - including a few of Dylan's Baby Blue, Tamborine man, etc. Do you recall Rolf Harris' (Tie me kangaroo Down Sport" ) song "Two Little Boys"? -- corny, but magical. I'm no parrot head, but do like some of Jimmy Buffet's songs as well.

My own interpretation of 'groomed' you say? I assume you mean in reference to my enquiry on the CPD admissions.

My guess is that the CPD "grooms" its applicants in the sense not that it "raises" them as it were to enter the department from fetus to their O-levels, but rather in the sense of "selections" of attributes and specializations that may be congenial to the CPD. In this way, "groomed" can be viewed as "profiling" or "weeding out" the "appropriate" candidates for admission. Intuitively, this comes to mind.

Though perhaps you mean something more. I am not certain, and I am not familair with the admissions procedures of Cambridge in general. I would like to know of course, as I will be submitting my application for gradute studies in maths in '07.

Lola:-

I'm out ot time.Study it a little.It is a very clever MCP yoke.

How to pronounce "GHOTI"... and why

Did you ever wonder why we spell some words in English in ways which bear no resemblance to the way they are pronounced, for example:

laugh sigh sight
enough nigh night
rough thigh height
rough thigh height
cough sleigh light

Remember Bernard Shaw's word ghoti with the [gh] from "laugh", the [o] from "women" and the [ti] from "nation" and could be pronounced "fish"? Would you believe after that, that the distribution of the two pronunciations of [gh] in English is amazingly regular? See if you can figure out the rule. The [gh] was originally pronounced like the [ch] in Scottish loch "lake" or German lachen "laugh" (like you're clearing your throat). The preceding represented lip-rounding (watch yourself pronounce the sound in the mirror - what happens to your lips?) which was pronounced simultaneously with [gh]. When the [gh] disappeared because it was so softly pronounced, lip-rounding changed to lip-biting (check where your teeth are when you pronounce [v] or [f]. So [gh] ended up pronounced [f] because of the disappearance of a softly pronounced consonant and a shift of lip activity.

However, [gh] did not develop into [f] everywhere. To detect the word position in which it did, compare the following examples with those in (1) above. If you still aren't sure of the answer, click here.

bought sought caught daughter
fought ought taught slaughter

In fact, the original sound of [gh] in English was the same as the [ch] sound in Germanic languages from which Englis (German, Dutch, Flemish, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, and Norwegian) historically developed. Take a look at the following words from German, where the sound is usually represented by the letters [ch]. The sound goes back to an even older stage when it was pronounced [k]. To see this, compare the Germanic words in English with related words borrowed from Latin. The stems in the Latin words were originally the same stems in Indo-European as those in the Germanic words.

ENGLISH GERMAN LATIN
eight acht octopus [oktopus]
fight fechten infect [infekt]
right Recht rectify [rektify]
high hoch

By the way, the change of [k] to German [ch] followed the same Grimm's Law that gave us Germanic [f] from Indo-European [p] and [th] from [t].
The branch of linguistics dealing with sounds and sound changes is phonology. If you figured out the rules explaining the examples above, you might be interested in other aspects of how your brain and tongue are wired together - and how they are wired to the heads of ancestors going back to the Dnepr valley 5,000 years ago. Remember the magic word: LINGUISTICS. It doesn't mean speaking a lot of languages. And it may be the newest science.

Answer
Old English [gh] became [f] after when it was at the end of words. There were exceptions, though: "through" (and related "thorough"), "borough," for example. However, this position is the only one where [gh] became [f] over the history of the language.

laugh sigh sight
enough nigh night
rough thigh height
tough high right
cough sleigh light

When [gh] occurred after but NOT at the end of a word, it simply disappeared and is no longer pronounced.
bought sought caught daughter
fought ought taught slaughter

GHOTI DOES NOT SPELL FISH!

gh cannot have an "F" sound at the beginning of a word (give just one example)
it cannot have an "SH" sound at the end of a word (give just one example)

It is true that GH can have an "ef" sound at the end of a word as in "rough" ,"cough" ,"laugh", etc. GH can also have an "ef" sound in the middle of a word as in "roughage" and "laughing". However, GH never has an "ef" sound at the beginning of a word. It cannot be used that way. It is always preceded by a vowel!
Though there are few examples, o can have an "i" sound as in "women".
TI, on the other hand, cannot be used at the end of a word. It must be followed by a vowel! In fact, it isn't actually "ti" that has the sh sound, it is the combination of i and another vowel, the "t" is actually almost silent as in the common construction "tion". So you see, ti alone doesn't have an "sh" sound it is the combination of t, i, and another vowel (usually o) that has an sh sound and it must be followed by at least one more letter.
People don't think of "fish" when they see "ghoti" because "gh" and "ti" are never used that way!

In short, even in the world of irregular English spelling, you cannot spell fish "ghoti" any more than you can spell it "OLJHGOIUZXX". The latter makes just as much sense as the former.

You could spell fish "phoche" (PHoto wOmen quiCHE), but why would you want to?