What?
Being a Very Frequently Asked Question
The word ghoti is a bit of quasi-linguistic silliness perpetrated by George Bernard Shaw, who was a firm believer in reform of the English orthographic system. His example of how flawed English spelling is was "ghoti", which he claimed was an alternate spelling of "fish": "gh" as in "laugh", "o" as in "women", and "ti" as in "nation".
Of course, no native speaker of English can look at the word "ghoti" and say "well, that's a funny way to spell 'fish'." The only pronunciation most people find possible is ['go.ti], not [fɪʃ]. Thus, Shaw's example actually serves more of an example of how regular English spelling is. (Which is not to say it isn't flawed, of course. But if you're trying to demonstrate that, "ghoti" isn't the example to use.)
So basically, it's just a very silly word. But that's okay; I like silly words. And so I've adopted "The Flying Ghoti" as my preferred sobriquet. I've heard worse.
Incidentally, the banner at the top of this page says "the flying ghoti" in three different scripts: Latin, Shavian, and the International Phonetic Alphabet. The latter two, which are both phonetic, claim that the word is pronounced like "fish". This is because I am perverse.
As for the site itself—well, this is where I'm supposed to go on and on about all the functions of this thing, and why you should find it fascinating. Look: it's a personal website. There are a few pages about things I've written, a lot more pages about things I may never finish writing, a personal encyclopedia covering an alarming number of subjects from the things I have and haven't written, some entirely unnecessary navigational tools, and a bunch of blogs. In short, it's full of crap you probably don't care about. It's pretty big for a personal site, which makes it slightly more likely that somewhere on here is one piece of information you'll find interesting. Feel free to look for it. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
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