(In sympathy with Elise, who thinks spelling is worse than torture because it doesn't make any sense at all.)
The apparent perversity of English spelling is occasionally tamed by a simple rule. For example, I remember learning the famous poem:
I before E,
Except after C.
It didn't take too long for this rule to run into trouble, and I next had to learn the "revised" version:
I before E,
Except after C,
Or when sounded like A,
As in "neighbor" and "weigh".
But just when we fancied that spelling had become a science, a prescient foreign geisha woman named Deirdre Oppenheimer came down from the heights of a glacier, tore off her veil, seized an ancient financier, and shamed our consciences grievously. "This society is inefficient!", she inveighed. "I wasted my leisure becoming proficient in cuneiform hieroglyphs. Either reimburse me with the value of the Einstein coefficient, or I will drag this man back to my hacienda in Muncie, wherein he will forfeit his life!"
I feigned interest, but looked for our feisty concierge Neil, whom I might inveigle into reining in this weird being. But he had gone to Anaheim, Beijing, Madeira and Taipei with Alexei to shop for a beige geiger counter. His absenteeism made me feel like queueing for the exit. The only sound was the neighing of the sheik's eight reindeer, chewing their edelweiss.
I turned to Sheila, the Budweiser heiress. "Cease your surveillance of the sleigh and its freight! We must stop the reign of this plebeian atheist!" I must have hit a vein, because she deigned to put down her counterfeit kaleidoscope proficiently, albeit only to point out a weird Klein bottle full of nucleic proteins. "Therein is the skein of meiosis," she said, "the leitmotif of our species, of seismic importance to our homogeneity. It would surfeit a meistersinger, a sovereign, or even an omniscient deity like Poseidon."
Decreeing my obeisance, I offered the paperweight, a Meisterbrau stein, and a Holstein heifer to the heister. Agreeing that it was sufficient, she reinstated the old wisenheimer, fleeing with spontaneity via Boeing to Beirut.
CIE words:
agencies
ancient
coefficient
concierge
conscience
deficient
efficient
fancied
financier
glacier
hacienda
Lucie
Marcie
mercies
Muncie
omniscient
policies
prescient
proficient
science
society
species
sufficient
tenancies
EI words:
absenteeism
ageism
albeit
Alexei
Alzheimer
Anaheim
atheist
beige
being
Beijing
Beirut
Boeing
Budweiser
caffeine
codeine
counterfeit
cuneiform
deign
Deirdre
edelweiss
eider
eight
Einstein
either
Fahrenheit
feign
feint
feisty
foreign
forfeit
freight
geiger counter
geisha
heifer
height
heinous
heir
heist
herein
Holstein
homogeneity
Hygeia
inveigh
inveigle
kaleidoscope
Keith
Klein
Leicester
leishmaniasis
leisure
leitmotif
Madeira
meiosis
monteith
neigh
Neil
neither
nonpareil
nuclei
nucleic
obeisance
onomatopoeic
Oppenheimer
plebeian
Pleiades
poltergeist
protein
queueing
reimburse
rein
reindeer
reinstate
reinvent
reitbok
seismic
seize
sheik
Sheila
skein
sleigh
sovereign
surfeit
surveillance
Taipei
their
theism
veil
vein
weigh
weir
weird
wisenheimer
zein
zeitgeist