A Word to the <y>s

It’s not uncommon for me to start writing about one thing, only to stall, and then later to realize that it stalled because I was writing about the wrong thing. I have at least a dozen unfinished drafts in my Shameless Spelling hopper, and I am not even remotely worried about finishing any of them. That’s part of the creative process for me: figuring out sometimes that I really don’t have anything valuable to say about something. I’m not a good eater of leftovers, and the same is true of revisiting old drafts. I often find them not exactly tasteless, but, well, nothing new.

The key for me in eating leftovers is to find a way to make the leftovers something different. Chop up a leftover salmon filet into scrambled eggs and serve it with scallions and capers and sourdough toast for breakfast. Or turn any leftover meat into tacos, any leftover bread into garlic sticks, any leftover vegetable into soup.

I suppose it’s similar with my leftover drafts of articles: I am only interested in them when I can add other ingredients and make something new. This post is a good example of repurposing a word study that initially fell flat but was rescued by a Pop-Up class. I had been barking up the wrong tree, asking the wrong questions, but in exploring the topic from a different angle, I am now able to realize something new and to articulate something really compelling about English orthography.

My original draft on this topic was titled Considering the Variables, and it was concerned with the double <rr> versus the single <r> in words like marry, carry, and vary, which rhyme for many, but not all, English speakers. That draft was a response to some claims made by an admin of one of the big Facebook groups several months ago, about these very words. Those claims are faulty, but not for the reasons I initially thought. The concern in front of the admins was the identity of the base elements in the words in question, or whether they should be parsed as base elements themselves, but the admin made pronouncements without offering any evidence. I’ll lay that out below. 

What’s turned out to be really fascinating about these words and their (mis)study, however, is that we were all asking the wrong question the whole time: what is the base element?

So if that’s the wrong question, what is the right one?