Everyone knows that English spelling is a mess, but it’s one of those things that most people just accept as locked in, like the similarly irrational QWERTY keyboard. Because the English language has largely functioned by accumulating bits and pieces of other languages, its orthography is a bricolage of different orthographies and its speakers need to have at least an intuitive understanding of many words’ origins in order to pronounce or spell them correctly. It’s so bad that Thorsten Veblen