The Unspellable Word

When I was in China, I thought it was so limiting to use characters (where each character codes for a syllable) instead of an alphabet. How could they invent new words with a fixed and already assigned number of words? But now I can't speak with complete disdain; I've found a new word that's unspellable. I don't mean appropriating a word from an African language with clicks, which we obviously can't pronounce, and thus can't spell. I mean a word whose pronunciation is so common you wouldn't even think about how unusual the unspellable word really is. In fact, it's half a word.

"What's up?"

"The usual."

But speaking with complete words gets boring sometimes and we leave off the end sometimes. Instead of "whatever" girls say "whatev." One girl in my English class actually asked a guy, "So what are you doing over Christmas vaycay?" The stress was on the first syllable. "Vacation," she clarified. So it shouldn't be strange that we do the same thing with the word "usual."

"What's up?"

"The "--us? youj? yuj? uzh? us(ual)? There's no way to spell the first half of "usual"! We don't have a good way to spell it in any case. "Vision" writes the sound as "si." It's "uge" in "luge" (but not "uge" as in "huge"!). It's "s" in "treasure," "z" in "azure," and "g" in "rouge."

My favorite is taking the Chinese pair "zh" and making "uzh." What's ironic about that is that Chinese doesn't have this sound. My Chinese teacher in Chengdu spoke great English but never mastered "usually." "Youyou-ly," she would say as an approximation.

To solve the problem of the unspellable word, I called Marian, my go-to person for all the linguistics questions I have. "Oh," she said. "The voiced postalveolar fricative. That is an interesting problem." The symbol, as it turns out, is ʒ (which is itself spelled "ezh"). If I hadn't pulled up the Wikipedia page, though, for the "voiced postalveolar fricative", I wouldn't have been able to copy-and-paste the character in. I can't type "ʒ." It does look like a 3, but u3 looks like an energy drink or Bono's upgrade, so I can't forsee people writing "the u3." If it happens, though, I called it.

In the meantime, we have an unspellable word.