Silent But Invisible
Our Congress has a laundry list of laws to debate, dissect, and delay, yet one of the most important subjects of all—the English language—isn’t even on its agenda. We teach our children mathematics. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it: 2 + 2 = 4. But when we teach them how to read and write, those same ifs, ands, and buts seem to buzz around their heads like bees in a hive. They see a word, but hear something else entirely. They read knee , and sound it out as k-nee . Then the teacher informs them that the k is silent. The same happens with thumb , island , talk , hour , and a host of other words filled with silent letters. Are we intentionally confusing our children? Might it be better for their mental health if we simply eliminated silent letters altogether—made them vanish into linguistic history?
Silent letters are fossils. They preserve history and often reveal a word’s origin, but they do not help us read or write. If someone wants to know why a word has a silent letter, they can look up its etymology—and then get on with reading and writing without extra, unpronounced baggage. “Oh,” you say, “but what about words that need silent letters to distinguish meaning?” That’s called a silent- letter disambiguator—quite a term for something that, ironically, contains no silent letters itself. Not and knot is one example; whole and hole is another. These homonyms are common in English, as are homophones and homographs. Oh, the confusion our children must endure! But what if we dropped the k in knot and wrote, “He tied a not on his shoelace”? Surely context would carry the meaning. Willn’t it? There are roughly 200,000 commonly used words in the English language, not including technical terms, slang, acronyms, and the like. Whew. Reading and writing would surely be easier if we trimmed the excess—especially words that seem no longer necessary, such as disambiguator , homonym , homophone , and homograph . Come on, Congress. Put the English language on your agenda.
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Estrella Publishing - Main Street magazine
May 2026 25
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