Gee each owe tea eye smells fish

So, very often I find myself explaining the name godghoti. I use said name frequently, as it is quite a bit more unique than my given name, which if you google comes up with, among other people living and dead, one man on the FBI's ten most wanted list.

Godghoti, on the other hand is a name that is practically entirely controlled by and refers to yours truly. Having a completely unique digital alter ego is a hard thing amongst the hundreds of millions of people on the interweb.

This all started many years ago, when a close friend declared "oh, do you know how to spell ghoti? No, not fish... FISH!" and since that cryptic utterance I have misspelled the word.

Let me clarify by quoting wikipedia... Ghoti is a respelling of the word fish, and like fish is pronounced /ˈfɪʃ/. It has,

* gh, pronounced [f] as in tough [tʌf]; * o, pronounced [ɪ] as in women [ˈwɪmɪn]; and * ti, pronounced [ʃ] as in nation [ˈneɪʃən].

Now, I had been operating under the impression that the spelling reform oriented version of fish was a thirties invention, but it turns out (yay wiki-brain) that James Joyce referred to this phonetic absurdity in Finnegans Wake (providing me with the title of this entry,) and is probably older than that, say mid 1800's.

And the god-ghoti bit, well that is not as some have assumed to be a Jesus fish reference, but came from long ago when I was a problem solver and resource-mover. When you needed something absurd, you asked the godFish (you know, like the godfather, but without the organized crime ties.)

So, if you see my digital alter ego godghoti about, the odds are that it will jump back to me somehow. Oh, and you now know the word for fish in Klingon, as well.

tags: linguistics  ghoti  godghoti  fish  godfish  finnegans  wake  nickname  alter  ego  

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