Exceptions to "I Before E, Except After C" (Or, Basic Words Your Expensive Lawyer Cannot Spell)

Ask me to get high grades and earn an achievement award at a top 5 law school, pass the California Bar, and secure a post at a "top 3" national law firm? No problem. Ask me to spell the following words without the aid of a spell checker? Evidently, I will fall to peices, er...pieces.

Either I missed the memo on all the exceptions to the rule, or the adage "I before E, except after C" is working a cruel injustice upon millions of young children in our soceity society. I decided to consult the experts.

According to expert Bob Cunningham, "I before E, except after C" is pretty damn inaccurate, and does not apply:

• To words that are not digraphs;

1. examples: (i) diety; (ii) conscience;

•  to some words which have an "Ay" (as in Jay or May) sound;

1. examples: (i) neighborhood; (ii) weigh;

• to some words derived from non-English languages;

1. example: dreidel; and

• to plurals of words ending in "cy";

1. example: democracies.
    

Why wasn't I clued into these massive loopholes?! This epiphany caused me to review the hundreds of documents I have penned by hand, without the aid of a spell checker. And what I discovered shocked me-- rampant misspellings of words like:

• beige
• codeine
• conscience
• deify
• deity
• feign
• feisty
• foreign
• forfeit
• heifer
• heigh-ho
• height
• heinous
• heir
• heist
• leitmotiv
• neighbor
• neither
• prescient
• rein
• seismic
• seize
• sheik
• sovereign
• veil
• vein
• weird 

For a more detailed discussion of the exceptions to "I before E, except after C",  go here. I'm too busy putting a hit out on Mrs. Dupee, my good-for-nothing 3rd grade teacher.   

Comments

[Courtney]

geez!!!

[jojo Puhfang]

it's "i before e, except after c or when sounding like ay as is neighbor and weigh"