I know, you probably didn’t follow that link from Instapundit just to find out what on earth the name “Xrlq” refers to. Nevertheless, a few people have emailed to ask, so I’ll address it here.

“Xrlq” is nothing more than a very unusual spelling of my first name, Jeff. It is my answer to George Bernard Shaw some anonymous dude‘s amusing but factually incorrect observation that the rules of English orthography are so haphazard as to permit the word fish to be spelled “ghoti.” For those unfamiliar with ghoti, Shaw’s his rationale was that the letters -gh are often used to form the f sound, as in tough, rough, or enough. The letter o is rarely pronounced like the short i in fish, but it is used that way in women. Finally, the ti- forms an sh- sound in words such as cautious or ratio. So there you have it, fish can be spelled “ghoti,” right? Well, actually, no, it can’t. Both ti- and -gh are highly sensitive to their environment, i.e., the ti- sequence must immediately precede a vowel to be pronounced “sh,” and the -gh sequence must immediately follow the vowel to be pronounced “f.”

Thus, according to the real rules of English orthography, the most likely pronunciation of ghoti is “goaty,” or possibly “gitty.” Shaw The anonymous dude casually glossed over these inconvenient facts to make his point. I say, if we’re going to break some rules to make a point, why not break all rules and come up with something even sillier than “ghoti?” The rest is history.

UPDATE (11/13/11): While Wikipedia did in fact exist in 2003, this article probably did not, an in any event I dind’t see it until now. It turns out that ghoti probably did not originate with Shaw, but with an earlier spelling reform advocate, possibly one William Ollier. The article also notes that by manipulating (or, let’s face it, flouting) the same phonological rules that turned a ghoti into a fish, one could instead make the entire word silent by borrowing the gh from “bough,” the o from people, the t from ballet and the i from business. I like the silent ghoti better.