Poem for Wednesday

Hi!
Here's one I wrote a couple of years ago - it wasn't really my Uncle!


A CURIOUS LANGUAGE

My Uncle was a clever man, a King of Spelling Bees
He knew the length and breadth of words and the Latin names for trees
He was an English Master of no small intellect
Who practised crossword anagrams and spoke in dialects –
His zeal for punctuation was strict to such a level
That his poor and suffering students wished him gone - and to the devil!
He was, in short, a master of the glorious English tongue
Who knew the meaning of all words, spoken, mimed or sung -
But all his life he wondered at the lack of correlation
Between the spelling of some words – and their pronunciation –

For instance ‘W-I –N- D’ spells ‘wind’, but then you find
Those letters, quite unchanged, may be pronounced as ‘WIND’ (Wined!)
Then Cholmondeley – a curious name, it isn’t very comely
The educated and elite pronounce it simply ‘chumly’;
And Featherstonehough, pronounced like that, your tongue and teeth make war,
The toffs, who know a thing or two, say simply thus - ‘Fanshaw’.
Boatswain? – that is a naval term, all mariners will know some –
A tar who’s sailed before the mast will tell you it is - ‘bosun’!

Then famously there’s ‘plough’ and ‘bough’, that funnily enough,
Don’t rhyme with tough or rough or cough and other diphthong stuff.
And if ‘does’ (duz) is also said as ‘doze’,
Then why say ‘shoes’ not ‘shuz’ – or shows’?
If ‘spouse’ in plural is said as ‘spices’,
Then more than one small ‘mouse’ is ‘mices’.
If ‘route’ is ‘root’ then ‘bout’ is ‘boot’
And ‘shout should surely sound like ‘shoot’?

With cricket games you win or lose depending how you play ‘em –
It seems to be the same with words – it’s how you choose to say ‘em!
It’s English, famous mother tongue, of Shakespeare, Keats and Milton
The great communicating tool the English race was built on –
So many words, so many ways, so many rules for playing
Great wonder anyone at all knows what the hell we’re saying!