“Why isn’t the word “phonetically” spelled with an “f”?”

“Love, when spelled backwards and read phonetically, reads evil”

“At the same time, Dad was working on a book arguing the case for phonetic spelling. He called it 'A Ghoti out of Water.' "Ghoti," he liked to point out, could be pronounced like "fish." The "gh" had the "f" sound in "enough," the "o" had the short "i" sound in "women," and "ti" had the "sh" sound in "nation.”

“We give anonymously because the sackfuls of thank-you letters break our hearts with their clumsy handwriting and hopeless phonetic spelling.”

“Spelling bees are pretty much an English-speaking event, because other languages are much more consistent with spelling convention. Holding a spelling bee for a language with strong adherence to phonetics would be something akin to having a math bee in which contestants rattle off the numerals for a given number. "Bill, your number is one thousand and one.”

“Moving from phonetics to etymology, ‘vagina’ originates from a word meaning sheath for a sword. Ain’t got no vagina.”