Multiple Choice

You find me in a quandary. What a strange word that is, do all words with qu sound like relics of a forgotten world to you? Then, there are all those words with gh and ght in them – dinosaurs all, stamping round swinging their massive tails and bellowing at the top of their lungs. You know, writing is just a way of recording speech. Someone, some-when in antiquity, sat there with his quill pen and wrote w r i t t i n g and then he chewed the end of the pen and wrote t h o u g h t.

Now, you can forgive him for adding the w at the beginning of writing, it was, after all the bleeding edge of human advancement, and they all had high hopes for it. Putting a w at the beginning made it special, and writing writing, with its w, made the writer feel special too. But why thought? They may have imagined that they had just invented thinking, every generation seems to do that, but if they wanted to give thinking a bleeding edge spelling, why not apply a little consistency? Surely wthort would have done just as well?

I must confess, for a moment I had considered pondering on whether a quandary had three or four wheels or perhaps a fur-lined collar, but no, the actual problem is – do I claim the brownie points for catching the sheep right in the middle of the gateway or the crow in flight?