me_irl

From elsewhere in the Spiderverse

Cough bough bought fought trough caught dough...

And now they all look wrong!

Draught or is it drought? I can’t remember.
- Two different things!
  Draught is another spelling of draft, and is used to refer to the dept of the vessel under the waterline.
  Drought is an extended period without sufficient rainfall.

English is hard, but can be taught through tough thorough thought though

Almost anywhere you see a "gh" in an English word is a holdover from Old or Middle English. Those letters were originally pronounced as a kind of "back of the mouth scratchy cough-hack sound." Hard to describe in words, it's not a sound found in English anymore, because the Norman French didn't have it in their language when they conquered Britain. The spellings hung on long enough that they were made permanent by the printing press, but all of the different pronouciations come from various forms of French.

Almost, because I remembered the example word "ghost". English previously commonly spelled this word "gost" (or in Old English, "gast"), but Flemish typesetters felt like putting an h in there to match their word, "gheest". Because there really weren't spelling rules until typesetters started working, and we got a good number of modern spelling rules from them, after Caxton brought a press to London in 1476.

They can all go fuck themselves for making english spelling so damn inconprehensible
- Except they kind of didn't. When books were handwritten by scribes, every scribe used their own local variation of spelling to suit the wealthy buyer who had commissioned them. Later, it was in the best interest of typesetters for books to be readable by the most number of (wealthy literate) people, because they were creating more books on spec to be printed first and bought later, instead of creating each one bespoke for the buyer.
  But ... then as now, there were all sorts of different dialects of English across Britain. People in the north pronounced things differently from people in Wales, Cornwall, London, etc. This was even a known problem at the time: what spelling to use when your book had to be saleable across so many different pronounciations? A lot of it was kind of an arbitrary choice, with most of the spellings matching London speech, and some matching northern speech.
  I have to imagine that even at the time, there were people who read available books and wondered "Why did they spell it like that?" It's because printing made books "global" in a language and spelling landscape which was very "local".