{"id":16674,"date":"2018-02-21T11:51:48","date_gmt":"2018-02-21T19:51:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=16674"},"modified":"2019-09-14T13:57:41","modified_gmt":"2019-09-14T20:57:41","slug":"the_chaos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2018\/02\/21\/the_chaos\/","title":{"rendered":"The Chaos: Full version"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>(Content warning for referring to, and writing out in full, a specific racial slur.)<\/p>\r\n<p>Back in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/1999\/03\/28\/ggginger\/\">column ggg<\/a>, I attempted to piece together the famous poem about English pronunciation \u201cThe Chaos,\u201d based on a bunch of fragmentary online sources.<\/p>\r\n<p>And then in 2013, I came across the website of the English Spelling Society, which provided a full version of the poem, authorized by the original author\u2019s nephew, Jan Nolst Trenit\u00e9. But the link to that page has been languishing in my notes for years, and in the meantime the site seems to have gone offline. Fortunately for my purposes, the Internet Archive has preserved that page.<\/p>\r\n<p>So here at last, thanks to the Internet Archive and the English Spelling Society, is the <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20130328040926\/http:\/\/www.spellingsociety.org\/journals\/j17\/caos.php\">full version of \u201cThe Chaos\u201d<\/a>, by \u201cCharivarius,\u201d a.k.a. Gerard Nolst Trenit\u00e9, along with extensive notes about the history of the poem. (The original author changed it extensively over time, eventually nearly doubling the length of the original.)<\/p>\r\n<p>I find it interesting to compare this version with the version I patched together.\r\nMine is fairly close for a while, but some lines are quite divergent; and then it gets to the part where a dozen lines are missing from mine; and then the divergence dissolves into, well, chaos.<\/p>\r\n<p>I\u2019m especially chagrined that I assumed the word <i>darky<\/i> was from the original;\r\nnope, turns out the corresponding word in the full version is <i>khaki<\/i>. Apologies for having \u201crestored\u201d that word.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[70,77,102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pronunciation","category-rhyme","category-verse"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16674"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18018,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16674\/revisions\/18018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}