Offbeat: “I” before “e” except after whatever: The Brits kill grammar rule
- They said it had too many exceptions. The British government, after weighing their options, decided to get rid of their insufficient “i before e except after c” rule. They specifically decided to get rid of it in its “Support For Spelling” documents sent to thousands of primary schools, noting higher frequencies of words that did not follow that standard – neither with a “c” or without one. Just to emphasize the point, we used a bunch of different exceptions in this post. Weird. source