Your test case for “conclusively shown to be incorrect” should probably not be a pronunciation, given that pronunciations are basically matters of convention that inevitably change over time. How do you pronounce “February?” Or for that matter “laugh?” The mismatch between spelling and pronunciation in these words is not some crazy whim of English speakers for inserting extra letters; we really used to pronounce those letters and now we don’t because the fashion changed.
With regard to rationality, the point is that this quote is going to be a “force” for anti-rationality with a large subset of readers. New names to call one’s opponents rarely conduce to the best thinking; more often they merely serve to make both our minds and our social groups yet more insular. This is not always true, but it’s the way to bet.
In that case they probably incorrectly believed island to be derived to isle (same with the H in Anthony which comes from the Roman person name Antonius and not the Greek anthos ‘flower’), so I’m not sure I’d call it a whim… but certain letters were added at the end of words otherwise they’d be too short, and IIRC (I can’t seem to find a cite right now) money was spelled with a O and give with an E because the sequence un and final v would look bad in blackletter.
Your test case for “conclusively shown to be incorrect” should probably not be a pronunciation, given that pronunciations are basically matters of convention that inevitably change over time. How do you pronounce “February?” Or for that matter “laugh?” The mismatch between spelling and pronunciation in these words is not some crazy whim of English speakers for inserting extra letters; we really used to pronounce those letters and now we don’t because the fashion changed.
With regard to rationality, the point is that this quote is going to be a “force” for anti-rationality with a large subset of readers. New names to call one’s opponents rarely conduce to the best thinking; more often they merely serve to make both our minds and our social groups yet more insular. This is not always true, but it’s the way to bet.
Sometimes it is, for example the S in “island” was added to make it look like more like “isle”, from which it did not originate.
Wait, what? I’d always assumed...
In that case they probably incorrectly believed island to be derived to isle (same with the H in Anthony which comes from the Roman person name Antonius and not the Greek anthos ‘flower’), so I’m not sure I’d call it a whim… but certain letters were added at the end of words otherwise they’d be too short, and IIRC (I can’t seem to find a cite right now) money was spelled with a O and give with an E because the sequence un and final v would look bad in blackletter.