> > First Day as a Bartender
 > > Customer: I.ll have a martini, dry.

 > > Me, staring at all the liquid ingredients: I don.t know how to tell you
 > > this...

 > That one always used to throw me, too.  How can a liquid be "dry"?  :D

Welcome to English where only the poorest of words have a single definition.

I love this language! (only 'cause I know it so well!)

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it's said like bed, not bead -
For goodness sake don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose -
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart -
Come, come, I've hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I'd mastered it when I was five!

Nine different pronuncisations for -ough in one sentence:

A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the crowds 
on Lough Street in Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and
hiccoughed.


Your friend,

<+]:{)}
Cyberpope, Bishop of ROM
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