This is not about math. I just had a pre-somnolent image of a cluster of words that I just have to let out. In less pretentious language: I thought of this as I dozed off last night.

“A mnemonic pneumonic gnu’s knees.”

Nglish is a weird language. Note that of the 4 words that are all pronounced as though they start with en, none actually start with en. They also came from four different root languages to English (Latin, Greek, Khoikhoi, and German).

We are taught spelling in school as a sort of faith: This is how it is because it is. The root of spelling (in non-pictographic languages) is to produce a stream of characters (letters) to represent the series of sounds (phonemes) that make up each word. So why do we use three different letters for the same hard-K sound? Four if you count eks. Let’s knot forget the mental knife we use to silence kay itself in several common words. Why have we lost the letters for hard and soft ch? Greeks still use chi (χ is not x). Can you spontaneously spout the 5 pronunciations of “ough”?

Basically, why are so many words pronounced differently than they are spelled? The simple answer is, teenagers.