“I before E except after C” is not necessarily good advice.
Oops. I fear that this entry will be mis-listed in the index. It should appear in the letter I section, since, as we’ve all been taught, ladies before gentlemen, women and children first, horse before cart, age before beauty, calm before storm, I before E except after C.
Except in words like weigh and neighbor, the instruction graciously allows.
4 6
Bill Brohaugh
The gracious instruction falls short.
So it’s better to memorize the following bit of grammatical instruction (and there’ll be a quiz when you finish the book): I before E except after C.
Except in words like weigh and neighbor . . . and absenteeism and albeit and apartheid and atheism and beige and being and caffeine and casein and codeine and counterfeit and cuneiform and deify and deign and deity and dreidel and eider-down and eight and either and feign and feint and foreign and freight and geisha and gneiss and heifer and heigh- ho-heigh-ho-it’s-off-to-work-we-go and height and heinous and heir and inveigle and Leicester and leisure and neigh and neither and obeisance and Pleistocene and protein and reign and rein and reindeer and reinvent (without reiterating all the other potential re-suffix words) and reveille and seine and seismic and seize and sleigh and sleight and sovereign and specified and spontaneity and stein and surveillance and their and veil and vein and weir and weird and leiyons and teigers and beirs, oh mei.
So, “I before E except after C”? Well, sometimes. Or to follow the rule, putting the I before the E and all that, perhaps I should say, somitemes.