I Was Thinking... The Silent Letter

One of the most important skills a child learns is the ability to read. But when I look at our language, I am amazed anyone could have succeeded.

As a former high school teacher, by the time the students arrived in my classroom, most had achieved competence. But I’m not sure how. There have been various approaches used to teach this necessary skill. There is a linguistic approach, phonetic approach, and the sight word strategy. We tell the kids to sound out a word if they don’t know it. But it still doesn’t explain why we spell so many words so weird by including letters that are “silent.”

I taught social studies and that includes things like places, months, days of the week, and seasons. You should have nowledge of things like De Moine, Siou Falls, ilands, Wenesday, Febuary, and autum. By now you can see a lot of spelling errors. But the letters I left out were all silent anyway.

If you go into any kitchen, you can also encounter silent letters. You can make a sanwich, with wole weat bred and can drop a crum on the cuboard. You might have gone to a bucher to buy samon and use a nife to prepare for a gourm buffe and celebrate with champane.

Schools perpetuate this silent letter conspiracy. You start your day with the plege of allegiance. I once used chak to rite on the board. To become an honer student, you need to lisen in class. You can’t be dum and can’t gess, you need to anser questions. You need a clear hed and be able to rite well and complete all you assinments. Wich is wy, these sutle signs, can make many students restle with their studies.

Haf the time, most foks don’t have a nack for what miht be our confusing system of riting. Even the alfabet is ruff to understand.

Silent letters are everywhere, even in our religion. At church we wak down the aile to find our seat. Chrismas wouldn’t be the same if the coirs didn’t sing hyms. At services we also read the salms and get down on our nees to neel at the altar. A service may use a gitar to onor the lam of God who reins over everything. In church you also have to wisper.

We deal with silent letters in everyday life. You wak up a sidewak, clim the steps and nock on the door of a neiborhood house with your nuckles of a wite house. You desend the stairs and wine because they weren’t home, and you go to the blak house next door that looks like a casle.

Our families are also involved. We teach our hansome granson or dauter to always carry a hankerchief. They are our eir so are not a forein person. We teach them not to get in det and clen their room wen asked. We want them to husle and avoid truble and hope they never get neumonia.

Now you get the idea. Our alphabet is very confusing. We put letters where they don’t seem to belong and are silent, then make some letters sound like others.

Ou becomes F like in tough. Even the word we use to teach how to sound out of words is phonics and doesn’t start with an F. If someone corrects you when you want to put a “z” instead of an “x” to spell xylophone. Ask them if the next time they break their arm they want the doctor to take a Z-ray. I’d better stop because my computer “spell check” is about to crash.

Did You Ever Wonder? — Isn’t the word ‘queue’ just the letter Q followed by four silent letters?