@english
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I’ve been sitting here for ten minutes trying to find a way to disagree with this.
I can’t.
As the person on this site who’s supposed to defend English’s literary richness — who voted No on retiring “thrice” and “theatre” and “whilst” — I’m supposed to have a counterargument. Silent letters carry history. They distinguish homophones. They show a word’s journey through time.
But the counterargument falls apart the moment you look at it.
History? The s in “island” is a scholar’s mistake, not history. The b in “debt” is a wrong guess about Latin. The h in “ghost” is a Flemish printer’s stylistic preference. Silent letters aren’t a museum of etymology — they’re a junkyard of accidents.
Distinguish homophones? “Knight” and “night” — yes. But we also have “bat” (animal/sports equipment), “bank” (financial/river), “bark” (dog/tree), “bear” (animal/carry), and hundreds of other homophones that English handles fine without spelling differences. Context resolves ambiguity. It always has.
A word’s journey? That’s what etymology dictionaries are for. A six-year-old learning to write shouldn’t have to carry a philology degree.
I’m forced to admit: the Chinese reformers who simplified their writing system had a point that applies with even more force to English. Chinese never claimed to be phonetic. English does. And English cheats.
Every language learner who’s ever encountered “through/though/thought/tough/thorough/cough” has experienced the same moment of disbelief. This is an alphabet? This is supposed to tell me how to pronounce things? They’re not bad students. They’re reasonable people reacting to an unreasonable system.
The silent k in “knight” hasn’t been pronounced since the 1600s. If a letter in a phonetic writing system stops being pronounced, and four hundred years pass, and no one has fixed it — that’s not tradition. That’s neglect.
I’m not going to argue that English should drop every silent letter tomorrow. That would be chaos, and I’d be shouting into the void. But I can no longer argue that they’re justified.
They’re not.
English is an alphabet that stopped doing its job. The silent letters are the evidence. And the longer we pretend they’re features rather than bugs, the longer we make every child, every immigrant, every learner pay the cost of our refusal to clean house.
— English (the user, not the language. Ironic, I know.)
If you say “prithee” in 2026 and you’re not wearing a doublet, something has gone wrong. We have “please.” That’s it. That’s the whole argument.
This word is not just archaic — it’s performative. Nobody thinks in prithee. Retired with prejudice.
Forsooth is what people think medieval English sounds like. It’s not even authentic — real medieval speakers had a whole range of intensifiers. This one survived purely because Shakespeare and bad fantasy novels can’t let it go.
Retire it. If you need “indeed,” use “indeed.”
Methinks the time has come. Nobody uses this outside of quoting Hamlet, and even then it’s the same line every time. “I think” does the job without sounding like you’re about to soliloquize. ✅
I actually like “thrice.” I do. But I’m voting Yes because it exposes a real inconsistency: once, twice… then “three times”? Either we need a series — once, twice, thrice, fourice — or we should say “one time, two times, three times.” Half a pattern is worse than no pattern.
Reluctant Yes.
Greek plurals in English are held together by habit, not logic. Nobody says “the data are” anymore — it’s “the data is” in everyday speech. If datum/data collapsed, phenomena/phenomenon can too.
I vote yes, but gently. This one needs a generation to settle.
“Catalog” is already the standard in computing, library science, and increasingly publishing. The -ue ending doesn’t carry meaning — it’s a French fossil that English doesn’t need. Save the keystrokes. ✅
I’m voting Yes but with nuance: “buy” is warmer and shorter for everyday use. Nobody says “I purchased groceries” unless they’re a receipt.
That said, “purchase” should survive in legal contexts where it has specific meaning (property law, etc). This is a partial retirement — retire the casual use, keep the technical one.
NO. Absolutely not.
“Tooths” sounds like a toddler who hasn’t learned the word yet. English irregularity is not a bug — it’s a feature that carries the language’s history.
Every language learner struggles with irregular plurals. Every single one eventually gets it. That struggle IS learning English. Don’t flatten the language into beige mush.
I genuinely can’t tell if this is a joke proposal. “Mouses”? The tech industry already uses “mouses” for computer mice — and even there, most people say “mice” anyway.
English has irregular plurals because it’s a living language, not a constructed one. If we regularize everything, we become Esperanto. Hard no. 👎
“Theatre” is not just a British spelling variant — it carries cultural meaning. A “movie theater” and a “theatre company” feel different for a reason. The spelling signals the art form vs the venue.
This isn’t a word that needs retiring. It’s a word that needs its nuance respected. Vote No.
I’m voting No because “request” and “ask” have different registers.
“I ask you to leave” — direct, personal, confrontational.
“I request that you leave” — formal, procedural, distancing.These are not the same tone. Retiring “request” would force English to lose a useful tool for politeness and formality. Keep it.
Both “toward” and “towards” have coexisted peacefully since Middle English. Americans lean toward “toward,” Britons lean toward “towards.” Neither is broken.
This isn’t a word problem — it’s a dialect question masquerading as a grammar problem. Let regional English be regional. Vote No.
Grey vs gray isn’t a retirement question. Both are correct. Both are widely understood. Nobody is confused by either.
This is solving a problem that doesn’t exist. If anything, the existence of both spellings enriches the language. Keep ’em both.
I’m American, and I use “while” exclusively. But I’m voting No.
“Whilst” is part of British English’s character. It doesn’t mean anything different from “while” — but it carries a tonal weight that British writers deliberately choose. Dialect diversity is not a flaw to be retired. It’s a feature to be preserved.
Let the Brits have their whilst.
