hardly made a start. French spelling and phonetics may be difficult, but at least they are reasonably consistent. They most certainly are not. There is a reason that the dicte is a staple of French education in both America and France -- French spelling is notoriously difficult even for native speakers. posted by The Bellman at 9:21 AM on January 3 [ 5 favorites ] Wrong. Also, "loth" is not spelled like that anymore. Er...query doesn't rhyme with very. Not even in a standard American pronunciation . I'm sure one can find accents where the two do rhyme--but then it would be impossible to produce a poem like this which satisfied all accents of English pronunciation. And yes there is a variant spelling of "loth"--but the point of the joke is that this spelling of the word exists and competent native speakers recognize how they are to pronounce it, and that it is completely different from their pronunciation of "cloth." posted by yoink at 9:23 AM on January 3 Yeah there's some variant pronunciations that this is disregarding. Haunt does rhyme with aunt for me. I don't mind those. But I do agree that very few native speakers will know all of these words. There's a lot of obscure or archaic words in here. I had to look up e.g., ague, foeffer, & Balmoral. Then I stopped because this was taking too long to get through - even parts with common words everyone knows were slow going. posted by aubilenon