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I have a King Charles' Head to air: when people pronounce "height" as if it had an H on the end (sounding like eighth), rather than ending with the same sound as tight or weight. Webster's gives both pronunciations, and I assume it comes from people saying things like "height and width and depth" and just making them all sound alike, but it still causes me excruciating pain (it now occurs to me I ought to have raised this in the excruciating pain thread, but such resurrections seem to be frowned upon).
Anyone else driven mad by this, or similar crimes against the little bits of logic the English language can lay claim to?
Can anyone else end all of the paragraphs in a post with a preposition, even when finishing up?
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just to make you feel better about the logic of it all (or maybe not), I will tell you that OED gives both spellings and pronunciations for the noun (i.e., height, heighth) and goes on to say: In ME. the forms in -t were predominant in the north, and since 1500 have increasingly prevailed in the literary language; though heighth, highth were abundant in southern writers till the 18th c., and are still affected by some. The stem-vowel has generally been U, ey, ei, though forms in i occur from 13thc., esp. in northern writers, hicht being the typical Sc. form from 14th c.; in Eng. hight is found from 15th c., and was very common in 16th and 17th c.; highth was also very common in 17th c. and was the form used by Milton. The hei- forms come lineally down from OE. (Anglian héhþo); the hi- forms are due in the main to later assimilation to high. Current usage is a compromise, retaining the spelling height (which has been by far the most frequent written form since 1500), with the pronunciation of hight.]
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Dear Hyla: I guess that when thinking of the three dimensions, it is a natural trap to make them all rhyme.
"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height....... (hold it, no "h" on the end.
I have to confess I had to look up the sonnet to make sure. Bill Hunt
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OED gives both spellings and pronunciationsBut there have long been social overtones to this usage, I think. Dickens used this form in Hard Times – “ha worked sin I were no heighth at aw, in Coketown heer?” Vocabula Review opines priggishly: “Abuses of language abound, especially among those who speak and write uneducated English. Whereas people who aspire to write and speak the language well still maintain standards of speech and observe distinctions between words, the uneducated, like some juggernaut, massacre and obliterate. They slay nearly all that they say… heighth. She's over 6 feet in heighth. USE height. I am the same size as you in heighth. USE height.” http://www.vocabula.com/VRApr00.htmMore factually neutral is this, from H.L. Mencken’s ‘The American Language’ (1921): “In the days of the great immigrations,… were certain speech habits that the Irish brought with them—habits of pronunciation, of syntax and even of grammar. These habits were, in part, the fruit of efforts to translate the idioms of Gaelic into English, and in part, as we have seen, survivals from the English of the age of James I. The latter, preserved by Irish conservatism in speech came into contact in America with habits surviving, with more or less change, from the same time, and so gave those American habits an unmistakable reinforcement. The Yankees had lived down such Jacobean pronunciations as tay for tea and desave for deceive, and these forms, on Irish lips, struck them as uncouth and absurd, but they still cling, in their common speech, to such forms as h’ist for hoist, bile for boil, chaw for chew, jine for join, sass for sauce, heighth for height,….” http://www.bartleby.com/185/16.html
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mav, speaking of the Mencken, I just yesterday came into possession of this tome, and it is fascinating. he writes of the early squabbles over "Americanisms" in a chapter called The Two Streams of English. one interesting fact he throws out is that John Adams (with the support of Webster) pushed the idea of setting up an academy for ""correcting, improving and ascertaining the English language." There were such academies, he said, in France, Spain and Italy, but the English had neglected to establish one, and the way was open for the United States."[!]
just think how different things would be if we had a committee keeping the language "pure"!?!
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“Abuses of language abound..
I think we have seen it often enough on this very board that, of language as well as of power, one man's use is another man's abuse..
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a committee keeping the language "pure"!?!True! Or how differently UK usage might have been had Swift had his way in the foundation of such an institution... ....one man's abuse... thou slack-jawed addlepate whelp of misery! 
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veteran
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Mencken
At last, someone has brought in the Sage of Baltimore as the authority he was. His "American Language" with its numerous supplements was a truly scholarly work, one not expected from a journalist and mostly polemic columnist. I'll have more to say eventually about old H.L.
On the subject at hand, there is a line from a hymn [which begins, "Just as I am without one plea"] that refers to the "length, breadth, heigth" of God's love.
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Hi Boby:
Here 'tis -- the last verse (of six):
Just as I am, of that free love
the breadth, length, depth and height to prove,
here for a season, then above,
O Lamb of God, I come.
Charlotte Elliott [1789-1871]
Hymn 497 in The Australian hymnal
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