Twosday

Today is Toosday.

 Two's day is Twosday

Those two options don't work too well for me.  But that's not to much of a stretch.  In fact, I just used to incorrectly, but the purpose of language is too communicate, and I just did it again and yet, despite the incorrectedness of two different words in two consecutive sentences, not one reader will have misunderstood what I meant, whether or not they liked it.

If you're under 20, or if you read quickly, you may not have noticed the mistakes.  If you did notice the mistakes, just read the first paragraph again really fast, and you probably won't notice them, this second time, because 2 is the magic number.

We've got four common words (to, too, two and Tue) that are so mundanely familiar that not only do they now sound exactly the same, but they've worked their ways into our usage to become indistinguishable except by context and spelling, so it's pretty much a matter of time before they share a spelling as they now share a sound.

And we all know what that spelling will be whether we like it or not... and I don't.  We're going to end up using the spelling that is used already by everyone under 20; the most common and shortest one for all the words pronounced as to. (3, 4, 5, 6, 7  ....See?  I told you so.)

 alwaysinfo.us




Most English speakers seem to know without any confusion that two is the number, since it is one of the first words we learn in a sequence, which we then use daily from age 4 onward, along with its phonetically challenging cohorts one and eight.  But two already has another written way to signify it, (2), so it's not on as solid ground as it might wish to be.  We don't really need to put the letter t next to a silent w to form the word two, when the numerical symbol is so easy to understand and to write.



It's no stretch at all to think of Tuesday as the second day of the week since it is the second day of the workweek and many define themselves by their jobs.

Tuesday is already understood if we were to spell it Twosday, regardless of its placement within the week, because what else could a Twosday possibly be?  Some people might think that is crazy, or cute, or marketable, but no one reading it would think for a moment that the writer meant anything else, but a particular day of the week.

Today is Twosday, the second day of the week.

See how easy that was?

When asked "What are you?" in the time when Europeans thought of Sunday as the first day of the week, in a time when most couldn't write, when Sunday sounded comfortingly and suspiciously just like Son day,  the good people would answer "Christians."  That's the way they saw themselves.  Their lives circled around the church, which was the highest building, and at the very center of the town, and it all made sense to everyone so much that no one dared say anything other than the party line, all the way through the ages from Constantine until the time clock.

Now, if asked "What are you?" the answer might be "humans" or "people" or "Who the hell are you to ask me a question like that?" but what the questioner might want to know, most likely, is "What do you do?," which is a very telling phrase.  We are defined more now by what we do on our weekdays than what we do or don't do on Saturday and Sonday.  What you do, to many people, is now the simplified version of who you are, Monday through Friday.  Therefore, Monday starts the real week, even if Sunday still starts the calendar one, or more commonly signifies the end of the weekend, because "What are you?" is now answered with "a plumber" or "a writer" or "a blogger."  

How long are we as a people going to continue using those spellings, which no longer fit our conception of what a tw should sound like or what a Tue is?  I think the arcane Tue is gone since we don't even know what it is a misspelling of, but two is with us for awhile yet.  Will we ever write:

Tooday is Toosday?

Like to and too, which are now almost indistinguishable in spelling for anyone under the age of 20, all the common words that sound the same are going to end up with the common spelling of to.  Now that this statement has been written twice, even with two different spellings, doesn't it become a little more true?