Also file this under F: George Bernard Shaw probably did not create the spelling ghoti.
It’s a fish story, of course—a fish that got away from George Bernard Shaw, he of Pygmalion, Saint Joan, and Man and Superman. Shaw is generally credited with concocting an anti-phonetically pronounced “fish” by taking the GH sound from laugh, the O sound from women, and the TI sound from potion . 36 It’s a fun and oft-quoted word fabrication designed to deride quirks in our language, though its point is blunted when you consider that you could spell Jish this way only if the/pronounced GH ever ever once started a word in English, only if the sE-pronounced TI ever ever once closed a word in English, and only if O was ever ever once pronounced as a short I in any English word but women. (It would also be a sharper barb if English were spelled Engloti.)
Now, George Bernard Shaw was a vigorous proponent of spelling reform, but first mentions of ghoti appear some eight years before linguist Mario Pei hands the catch to Shaw in 1946, and they
> 6 When responding to the question, “What is 'ghoti'?,” writer Jim Scobbie responded, “It’s an alternative spelling of chestnut.”
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Bill Brohaugh
appeared with no reference to him. The Christian Science Monitor, on August 27, 1938, wrote “A foreigner who insisted that ‘fish’ should be spelled ‘ghoti’ explained it in this fashion....” Shaw was British, and thusly qualifies as a foreigner to an American paper, but likely said paper would have recognized this particular foreigner. In Finnegans Wake, published in 1939, J ames Joyce writes: “Gee each owe tea eye smells fish.” (Yeah, “smells” fish— Joyce was a jenius.) And the London Times quotes a Dr. Daniel James delivering the amusing concoction in a speech.
But the most compelling evidence that Shaw did not create this fish story? The fact that he never followed up by taking the TI from potion and the OUGH from thought to spell his own last name.