“I just chose words carefully”

I think they pronounce them non-phonetically, and I'm not really sure what's confusing about that. Pronunciation differing from spelling is literally what it means to say something isn't phonetic; if I accepted the spelling of other non-phonetic words as proof that something is phonetic, then everything by definition would be phonetic, and the entire concept would be pointless.

In my mind, the natural phonetic spelling of "le" is an L sound followed by an E sound. Works like "truffle" and "turtle" have an E sound followed by an L sound. I don't think that's phonetic.

> Conversations like this are a dead end. You can't devise a phonetic spelling convention without using a phonetic alphabet.

I don't disagree with the latter point, but the former doesn't make sense to me; unless you're saying that there wouldn't be enough phonemes representable by the letters to define spellings for all English words? In my mind, the entire point of a conversation like this is hypothetical changes to the language to make it phonetically consistent; of course it isn't right now, or we wouldn't need to have a conversation.

You've correctly identified what my reasoning is, but you seem to be circularly saying that since English isn't currently phonetic, it's impossible to come up with a spelling for it using sounds that roughly resemble the common sounds letters are using today in order to make it phonetic. I guess I don't know that it's literally impossible, but I don't think it's self-evident that it's not possible, and I think it's fairly straightforward changing the spelling of words ending in "le" to "el" would be more consistent to how "le" is used in other places in words where changing their spelling would be more difficult (e.g. there's not really any clear way to spell "less" without preserving "le" at the beginning).

You're definitely right that I hadn't considered that some dialects pronounce "missile" in a way where it's pronounced differently, but I'd argue that the obvious example (British pronunciation) was already basically ignored by the comment I was responding to, so I didn't really introduce the inconsistency.

Douglas Hofstadter, Le Ton beau de Marot (1997), pages xviii–xix:

> Because I have always had a very clear sense of how thing should look on a page, I dearly wanted to be able to control every tiny detail of my book's overall look, ranging from the cover art to the typefaces used to the size of the pages to the way displays are indented, and so on. Fortunately, the people at Basic Books have grown used to me and my idiosyncrasies over the years I have worked with them, and they assented to my unusual request.

> [new page] Consequently, I have enjoyed total control over such things as line-breaks, page-breaks, hyphenations, widows, orphans, density of word spacing within lines, fine-grained intercharacter spacing ("kerning"), and so forth and so on — things that most people usually are unaware of and simply leave to their publisher or their word processor. I am a fanatic, though, and these things matter a great deal to me. Not only do they matter to me, they have had an overwhelming impact on this book from start to finish. This may sound crazy, but it is the gospel truth.

> [section heading] Who Is Really Controlling Whom?

> Above, I very casually remarked that I have enjoyed total control over page-breaks and such things; yet the truth of the matter would be far more accurately captured by turning the phrase around and saying that the page-breaks and word spacing and such things have enjoyed total control over me! By this, I mean that I have been forced to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite passages in order to make a page boundary come out exactly where I wanted it. It is not just by some happy accident, for instance, that the poems inside chapters are never, ever broken across page boundaries.

> The amount of influence exerted on my text by concerns of purely visual esthetics is incalculable — and by "my text", I don't merely mean how I wound up phrasing my ideas, I mean the ideas themselves. Content has been determined by considerations of elegant form so often that I couldn't begin to imagine it. Every single line of text, for instance, is characterized by its spacing — how wide the blanks between words are. I can clearly see the spacing as I type on my screen, and I rewrite and rewrite in order to make sure that no line is too tightly or too loosely spaced. In the course of such rewritings — here extracting a word, there using a shorter or a longer one, elsewhere inserting a word where none was — words and phrases that I would otherwise not have thought of pop to mind, suggesting ideas I would not have thought of, and those ideas suggest unexpected paragraphs, and those paragraphs are in turn linked to other ones, and so on...

Yup. Watching so many of my peers struggle with some basic tasks like grabbing a url and inserting it into a chat buffer. I mean, come on. How many times a day you do this? And you just settled with always:

- going back to the browser

- clicking on address bar

- attempting to select the link with the mouse

- switching back to wherever you want the link

- inserting it

- realizing that you missed a character - mouse is imprecise for text selection

- repeating the process

- Oh shoot. It's a markdown, I need now to grab the description of the page too. And... back to the dance again.

Shit like this, for me is just pressing a key. And it nicely formats it (for whatever markup you want), grabbing the correct description, etc. I solved the problem once, and it just works and I never have to ever spare a split second neural signalling for it - there's no attention tax.

I'm forever indebted to my younger self for convincing and forcing myself to learn Lisp and spend some time understanding Emacs. Among all sorts of skills that I picked up during my tenure - CLIs, Unix, Linux internals, networking, git fundamentals, vim, various programming languages, front-end, devops, cybersec, etc. etc. - Lisp remains enormously practical, the best skill that I'm so glad I acquired.

  The origin of OK is disputed; however, most modern reference works hold that 
  it originated around Boston as part of a fad in the late 1830s of 
  abbreviating misspellings – that it is an initialism of "oll korrect" as a 
  misspelling of "all correct". This origin was first described by linguist 
  Allen Walker Read in the 1960s.
  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK