Ever wonder how English got such odd spellings in many of its words? An article from The Week in Yahoo News has the lowdown for you that is relatively painless and fun.
The article leaves out one of the explanations I've heard from the other DrC. Namely, that typesetters and printers of the Ben Franklin era inserted letters with curlicues just to make words look fancier - letters like y, g, h, q, and f.
Go figure.
