Spelling is not my strong point. I would likely do better if words were spelled a bit closer to the way they sound. But the use of silent letters, and sometimes two letters together making the sound that another letter could make on its own (think “tough” versus “tuf” here), can make things get a bit hopeless for me.
When it comes right down to it, I think we throw a lot of unnecessary letters into words. Just right there “unnecessary” has two “n”s and “s”s scrunched together.
Today I’m sharing the photograph of a sign posted on the wall of the bathroom above our toilet here in the Philippines. The phrase “sewerage system” was used rather than “sewage system,” which struck me as odd coming from the U.S.
Thinking we might have some extra stuff at work here, I consulted the interweb.
It turns out that we might learn from those using English as a second or even third language. In proper English, sewage is the somewhat icky to majorly icky stuff we try to send off through the “sewerage” system, which is the actual pipes and whatnots that carry it (the sewage) away.
It is properly a sewerage system.
—Mitchell
Hegman














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