Sure Sugar

Or: Wait, shouldn’t those two English words be spelled with SH? Despite its reputation and the infamous evidence to the contrary, I’m committed to demonstrating how regular English spelling actually is. Yet words like sugar and sure, I admit, mock that vocation. In being pronounced as if they began with SH, the pair require me to reach begrudgingly for a particular word to describe their spelling. That word is irregular. What I mean by this reluctantly applied label is that I can’t formulate the relationship between their initial sound and symbol as a rule. ‘S is pronounced like SH before U’ would be the rule, if it didn’t of course fail in most instances, such as subject, sublime, sunrise, superb, supply, surname and such – unless you happen to speak like/be Sean Connery. Just because an element of spelling is irregular, though, doesn’t mean it’s inexplicable. We can indeed explain these orthographically awkward words. That’s exactly what this article will attempt to do. To be clear,…