Citations:ghoti

English citations of ghoti

fish

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• 1874 October, S. R. Townshend Mayer, quoting Charles Ollier, “Leigh Hunt and Charles Ollier”, in The St. James's Magazine and United Empire Review, volume 14, page 406:

  My son William has hit upon a new method of spelling Fish. As thus:—G.h.o.t.i. Ghoti, fish. Nonsense! say you. By no means, say I. It is perfectly vindicable orthography. You give it up? Well then, here is the proof. Gh is f, as in tough, rough, enough; o is i as in women; and ti is sh, as in mention, attention, &c. So that ghoti is fish.

• 1938 August 27, “In Lighter Vein”, in Christian Science Monitor‎^[1], →ISSN, page 17:

  A foreigner who insisted that "fish" should be spelled "ghoti" explained it in this fashion: "Gh" is pronounced as in "rough," the "o" as in "women," and the "ti" as in "nation" — so maybe he's right.

• 1946 April, Mario A. Pei, “Some Comments on Spelling Reform”, in American Speech, volume 21, number 2, →JSTOR, page 130:

  In English, on the contrary, each word is a law unto itself. Shaw upholds 'ghoti' as a possible spelling for 'fish,' on the ground that we can use the gh of 'enough,' the o of 'women' and the ti of 'nation';...

• 1949 March 21, “No Ghoti Today”, in Time‎^[2], volume 53, number 12, →ISSN, page 36:

  One of these, of course, was G. B. Shaw, who long ago had pointed out that under the present system the word "fish" might just as well be spelled GHOTI; GH as in enough, O as in women, TI as in nation. GH-O-TI = fish.

• 1951, “Exchange: New Jersey Journal”, in The New Mexico School Review, volume 31, Albuquerque, N.M., →OCLC, page 27, column 3:

  Spelling is the sort of thing / That often makes me wish / That I could live by a pleasant shore / And there do naught but ghoti, / For g and h are f in cough / And o is i in women / Ti is sh in nation. / So little ghoties all go swimmin’.

• 1951, North Carolina Education, volume 18, Raleigh, N.C., →OCLC, page 16, column 3:

  Some years ago George Bernard Shaw proposed that we use the spelling ghoties for a familiar word. gh (as in rough); o (as in women); ti (as in nation); es. The word is fishes!

• 1953 August, “Paris Postscript”, in The Rotarian, volume 83, number 2, page 40:

  Ghoti. That spells fish — if we correctly heard a little international group of Rotarians who were discussing peculiarities of the English tongue at a sidewalk cafe.

• 1959 July, “Word Games”, in Changing Times: The Kiplinger's Magazine, page 46:

  Spelling bee. You can play this in teams if you like. First team offers the word ghoti. What does it spell? Answer: fish—gh as in rough, o as in women, ti as in nation.

• 1962 January, Jacob Ornstein, “English the Global Way”, in The Modern Language Journal, volume 46, number 1, →JSTOR, page 12:

  To indicate the inconsistencies of English spelling, linguists like to cite constructs such as ghoti.

• 1965 March, John Algeo, “Why Johnny Can’t Spell”, in The English Journal, volume 54, number 3, →JSTOR, page 211:

  G. B. Shaw’s well known suggestion that English spelling habits would allow ghoti for fish gains much of its humor from the fact that the vowel is a unique spelling and the consonants are positional variants misused.

• 1966 October 19, “An Egg Grows in Gotham” (13 min), in Batman, season 2, episode 13, spoken by Batman and Robin (Adam West and Burt Ward), via ABC:

  Batman: [removing card from the Batfile] Look at this. A new egg firm has just opened on Point View Street.

  Robin: "The Ghoti [pronouncing it "go tie"] Oeufs Caviar Company". Oeufs means "eggs" in French, but I don't get this other word at all.

  Batman: The word is "ghoti" [pronouncing it "fish"], Robin.

  Robin: "Ghoti" ["go tie"] is "fish"?

  Batman: [writing GHOTI on blackboard] See here. English phonetics. [circling "GH" and writing "F" beneath] "GH" becomes "F" as in tough or laugh. [circling "O" and writing "I" beneath] "O" becomes "I" as in women. [circling "TI" and writing "SH" beneath] "TI" becomes "SH" as in ration or the word nation.

  Robin: Holy semantics, Batman! You never cease to amaze me!

• 1970 March, Ronald Wardhaugh, “An Evaluative Comparison of Present Methods for Teaching English Phonology”, in TESOL Quarterly, volume 4, number 1, →JSTOR, page 69:

  Moreover, the orthography of a language such as English is not as bad as people like George Bernard Shaw have made it out to be with such spellings as ghoti for fish.

• 1973 October, G. Howard Poteet, “A Brief Note on Spelling”, in The English Journal, volume 62, number 7, →JSTOR, page 1029:

  It is true that there seems to be little system to the apparent phonetic chaos which George Bernard Shaw once pointed out permits us to spell fish with the letters ghoti.

• 1978 December, Josephine Swanson, “Humanavioral Objectives for Exploring Language”, in The English Journal, volume 67, number 9, →JSTOR, page 26:

  Students will: […] 4. Put up, however, with the difficulties of English spelling and decide that Shaw's joke about ghoti isn't all that funny.

• 1983 November 3, Roy Herbert, “Not all red herrings are ghoti”, in New Scientist‎^[3], volume 100, number 1382, →ISSN, page 355:
• 1996 March-April, Martin Gardner, “Lion Hunting and Other Mathematical Pursuits: A Collection of Mathematics, Verse and Stories by Ralph P. Boas, Jr. by Gerald L. Alexanderson; Dale H. Mugler (review)”, in American Scientist, volume 84, number 2, →JSTOR, page 192:

  That "ghoti" spells "fish" is so well known that James Joyce mentions it in Finnegans Wake.

• 2004, Daniel Pauly, “Ghoti”, in Darwin’s Fishes: An Encyclopedia of Ichthyology, Ecology, and Evolution, New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 96:

  Ghoti A manner of writing ‘fish’ that may have been proposed by George Bernard Shaw (source not traced) to illustrate what may be perceived as the irrationality of the rules for pronunciation in English, with gh as in rough, o as in women, and ti as in palatial. Thus, this book could have been named Darwin’s Ghoties.

• 2004 February, Susan Landau, “Polynomials in the Nation's Service: Using Algebra to Design the Advanced Encryption Standard”, in The American Mathematical Monthly, volume 111, number 2, →JSTOR, page 90:

  In 1500 B.C.E., a Mesopotamian scribe used substitution of cuneiform signs that had differing syllabic interpretations (much as "ghoti" can be an alternate spelling of "fish") to disguise a formula for pottery glazes.

• 2006 November 11, “Revelling in the oddity of English”, in Townsville Bulletin, page 89:

  Are you eating enough 'ghoti' lately? Or pheesi, pfuchsi, ftiapsh or even maybe ueisci?

• 2007 September 28, Harry Bingham, “You say potato, I say ghoughbteighpteau”, in The Guardian‎^[4]:

  George Bernard Shaw once commented that English spelling would allow you to write FISH as GHOTI (f as in rough, i as in women, sh as in nation.) But he couldn't have been trying all that hard, if that was the best he came up with.

• 2009, Laxman Swaroop Singh, The Obsidian Eye: Cat Journeys Through an Impossible Universe: Cat Journeys Through an Impossible Universe‎^[5], Baltimore: PublishAmerica, →ISBN, →OL:

  I shivered when I heard the curse. I pissed in my dhoti like a frightened fish, a ghoti.

• 2009 October 6, Jeannette Walls, Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel, New York: Scribner, →ISBN, →OL, page 35:

  At the same time, Dad was working on a book arguing the case for phonetic spelling. He called it A Ghoti out of Water.

• 2010 June 27, Ben Zimmer, “Ghoti”, in The New York Times Magazine‎^[6], →ISSN, page MM14:

  When talk turns to the irrationality of English spelling conventions, a five-letter emblem of our language’s foolishness inevitably surfaces: ghoti.