Walked with Crabby today.
We squelched in the mud through the trails.
The thing about the word squelched is that it's an unholy amount of consonant sounds to place on the back of a single vowel. Let me give you the breakdown-
s-k-w-E-l-ch-t
Roughly the sounds made as best I could figure! That's SIX consonants on one vowel.
The only word that I think can beat it is strengths
s-t-r-E-ng-k-th-s
Seven sounds. If you don't think there's a 'k' sound in strengths, you're wrong and I'm right. Fight me.
Say it. Say it out loud. You're put in a little bitty 'k' in there. Don't lie to yourself. Don't try to roll it straight into the 't' out of spite. That's not how you say it. You put in a 'k'. You always have.
And you always will.
Anyway, linguistically English is weird in that the rules of how you can put sounds together allows you to do that. A lot of languages don't.
Mostly because crushing a bunch of consonants together is often hard to parse and so vowels are a good opportunity to break things up and create rhythm and harmony and such.
But not English. Just nash away you little goblin.
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