Race → racial
Space → spatial
I’m sure there’s a good explanation for the oddity, but I thought I’d point it out.
Nano → weirdo
Just thought I’d point that out.
I’m afraid there’s probably no good explanation for me, though.
What does space have to do with spatula? I really don’t get it.
So how’s your spatial awareness in a palatial palace?
If I were in one it would be no worse than now. It got near 100F today and I think the cooking has tightened up my braign.
…Now wait just a doggone minute, there: show me an impalatial palace.
It’s still bacon hear two.
Remember this big racial spatial (or racial spacial, or racial special) moment?
Roddenberry arguably played the coward by pandering to viewers who frown on employee fraternisation. By making a captain and lieutenant (boundaries are, after all, boundaries) unwilling erotic space puppets of an evil space meanie, I say it never really counted as an office romance, shocking as the idea of chasing your co-worker around the copier was in the day. But despite their acceptable cries of protest as polite society expected of them, being under coercion and durance vile, the naughty bit was that you could tell they really wanted to be unprofessional anyway. Admit it: we all wanted them to be unprofessional anyway. Not bad.
And the nice thing about that way being paved, is that now that we’re all a bit more enlightened, intracorporate love is generally no big deal. 
For the time though…
In West Virginia, spatial, spacial, and special are all pronounced the same.
Greece → Greek
Greece → Grecian
Is it possibly something as simple as:
Greek/Latin/Germanic
It’s English, and therefore random
Yes. So mind your spelling, everyone.
I do not have a good memory for semi-random patterns, so I have never been good at Ingglish spelling. The only way I can remember the difference between were and where is to remember that where is here plus the w. “Where? Here.” I just know it is a way pedantic twits can put people down. “Oh, he should know better that to use discreet when he really meant discrete. Now we can dismiss him as an uneducated dolt.” I think the Normans, who started out as Vikings, were so deeply offended when they realized they had been turned into Frenchmen, they invaded Brittan and invented the English just to get back at the French. The more kindly pedantic twits would look at me and say “Oh, it would all make perfectly good sense if you knew the history of English.”. That is all well and good but for the fact no one said “Oh, he is an intelligent dyslexic lad who is not good at the rote learning of English spellings. Let’s give him a terribly interesting course in the history of English spellings. It will all make sense to him.” at any point is my early academics. And the English vowel shift has to be the work of Satan after the Normans had already given us the French’s bizarre use of the Latin alphabet.
I would argue a similar case.
Race comes from raza or something similar, space from spatium. E.g. an s-sound versus a t-sound.
There is an argument that the fixation on spelling was a Victorian conceit, and previously English’s creole origins made spelling happily random. I wonder if Johnson’s dictionary had anything to do with it. Just yesterday I fell foul of “fulfill” where the spell-checker only allowed one spelling, and not the one I prefer. OED is not my favourite dictionary, but it quotes two alternative spellings for “fulfil/fulfill”. So long as the meaning is clear, I will tolerate imaginative spelling, but it’s apparent that the computer will not.
I would have done it. I am a person of Viking descent. Case closed.
Yes Rod. I’m glad you said so. I have few claims to brilliance, but can visualize words, and therefore spell (except insofar as my typing fingers and my visualizing brain forget to communicate.) This trait does not make me particularly valuable, except for when you need someone who can spot the G in this annoying grid of 6s. (a Facebook thingy.) Or something like that.
My male kid, though weird, has a much more vivid imagination. I could use some of that. But he’s somewhat dyslexic and can’t spell. A little exposure to learning differences and intellectual variations should dash anyone’s pedantic prejudices, but it doesn’t always.
(speaking of pedantry, my very intelligent but out-to-lunch brother insists on speaking Spanish with a Castilian lisp. “Why?” I want to know. Almost anyone in our area speaking Spanish is Mexican or Salvadoran or something. “Because I’m a snob,” he responds, with only slight self-deprecation. This leads me to wonder why he doesn’t speak English with a British accent.)
Face comes from faza, so it’s becomes facial. Unless you’re talking about fatium. In that case, it’s fatial. I am of the opinion that space should have derived from spaza. And if it did not, why not?
The coy response “Because I’m a monster” when asked why you would tie people up and do ghastly things to them (reading them your “poetry” counts) doesn’t get you any more excused for the offense. Tell him THAT next time. Maybe in your best faux-British accent, just to drive the point home.
This, of all things, I should get from a Russian already. спасибо, as I hear you folks are known to say.
Honestly, I used to presume that “race” in all its meanings must have stemmed from one word, probably the Latin “ratio”; “race”, as in “run”, IOW what one does in measurable competition by in fact whatever conveyance despite the footlier verb, ergo “lineage” as in “a ‘run’ of a bloodline, ethnicity, quality” as we might use “run” colloquially even today to suggest temporality, “ratio” covering all in measuring, making distinctions, thence “ration” and “rational” in, again, apportioning and measure. The moral of the story is: So much for one’s own idle folk etymologies. If I had been right, then it follows that “racial” really ought to be spelled with a T. And that would have been so perfect. But alas. It was not to be.
My, aren’t we just having fun, though.
Rod, I may be a twit and even pedantic (I notice you had no trouble spelling any of that, BTW 
), but I don’t put people down for their spelling. A clear message is what counts. On the rare occasion that I say anything, I laugh WITH them, not AT them. Probably not a good idea anyway in the interests of world peace, I suppose. As to your issues with “were” and “where”, I assure you I have crosses of my own to bear: “address” is only one of them.
Really, I’m not all that concerned with spelling and such, except for mine. That’s it. It can be a bugger, and I understand that. I don’t mind being corrected, but it’s precisely because I’m so tightassed about my own spelling (and such a compulsive re-editor), that I think I richly deserve it, and so it’s good for a laugh. But just because I can take it, it doesn’t mean that other people should have to as well. I am occasionally fascinated by the apparent anomalies in our language’s instituted spellings, thus the OP. But what I’m really all about is the elasticity of English, the playground of it, such that you can make up silly but undeniably functional words like “collapsion”, “toadity”, or “umbrelloid” - or “impalatial” and “footlier”, as I did earlier in this very thread. Use them enough, and you never know what permanent damage you could do to the lexicon. It’s subversive.
Thing is, some people take me seriously and correct me for my vocabularic affronts ( ). You can give them a pitying look, but usually the message is lost on that lot. Oh, well.
I think we should be able to bring a bit of our own elasticity to bear when it comes to others’ spelling, if for no other reason than to understand what they meant to convey. I’m afraid I failed spectacularly at that last night at the corner store, though. It’s run by Egyptian-Brazilian-Americans, so you get a load of Mediterranean food of the Arabic persuasion on offer. Good stuff, too. I happened to look at the display, feeling peckish, and noticed something promising I’d never seen before: hefty, generous square blocks of something labeled “keish”. I asked what it was, this keish (I tried to say it as if I had some familiarity with how Arabic should be pronounced; I think “qayssh” was how it came out), and the guy irritably said that it’s what it usually is: made of eggs, spinach and onions. I laughed in embarrassment and said to the Somali next to me - who was also curious by now - that I would have had a much better time of it if it had been spelled in the French manner. I mean, cut me some slack here; you have to admit that “keish” looks plumb Arabic as all get-out. What was I supposed to think? The Somali laughed too, and the fellow in charge - an employee of obviously northern European descent, BTW, so I wasn’t sure what the big deal was to him - got even more irritated. He’s usually brusque at best anyway, but still. If it was supposed to be the Lebanese iteration of quiche, I think he could have at least been pleasant enough to say so. Left with nothing else to go by, for my sins I bought a piece and ate it cold.