Comment by wongarsu
3 days ago
Right, I before E except after C, except when you run a feisty heist on a weird beige foreign neighbor. Caffeine strung atheists are reinventing protein at their leisure. Plebeians may deign to forfeit either that or seize the language and reinvent it
Has anyone actually counted whether that rule is more often true than wrong?
Brief mention on Language Log back in 2009[0] says 'They are saying that teaching the list of "-cei-" words directly is a better strategy than teaching the rule: it is not sufficiently general to pay its way.'
Which is basically saying the rule is worthless?
[0] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1525
It might be silly to impose rules on the English language at all.
And yes, I realize by putting that in an HN comment to live on the Internet forever, the ghost of every English teacher I had growing up in the US is going to haunt me, one by one, until I am mad and rendered unable to communicate because the anarchic amalgamation that is the English language has lost any shadow of sensibility.
In fairness, I find it a perfectly wonderful language to get creative with, but I really do believe its evolution as a sort of Frankenstein's Monster, composed of parts borrowed from German, Latin, French, etc, has allowed it to transcend into something that broke free of any rules we tried to impose upon it. We're taught different ways to write an essay "correctly" for the sake of appeasing specific branches of academia, grammatical structures that are often awkward and completely at odds with how we actually speak, inducting more and more colloquialisms and slang into the accepted dictionary authorities each year as the stodgy old guard, once considered rebellious and fresh, passes on to the next generation.
English is dynamic and alive, in that way, leaving our educational curriculum running to catch up. Believing that, I cannot blame even the most eloquent native speaker for getting things "wrong" from the perspective of a non-native speaker. It's likely that they learned different and flimsy rules at different times from different sources.
The rule only applies to vowel sounds like the ones in believe/receive. There are versions of the rhyme that attempt to include this caveat.
Being unscientific, societies veil deficient idiocies, reifying their weird, counterfeit policies.