My entire life I have known speach to mean the verb that describes the act of speaking in the present tense, while speech to be the verb that is the past tense act of speaking professionally/publicly to a group.
According to google :The correct spelling is speech. “Speach” is an outdated spelling from hundreds of years ago and is now considered a spelling mistake.
English degree and retired schoolmarm typing here.
If you and I were speaking in person, what we were doing could be described as the act of speech. (act and speech are both nouns in that phrase) For the past tense you would say we spoke.
Einstein up there looks like he’s giving a speech. Speech is a noun, like a candy, or a damn, which he could also give if he chose to.
Sounds like somewhere in elementary school you got corrected on the spelling in the context of “he gave a speech” and decided that spelling was special to that meaning.
Which is reasonable and allowed you to continue thinking
(incorrectly, but also reasonably)
speak–>speach
But the truth is more boring, it’s only the one word for ordinary and special speech. And the correct spelling is not the reasonable one you derived.
As to how it’s been this long…It’s the kind of error people might notice but assume it’s a typo and not bother to mention, because it’s not confusing.
Correct grammar is relative after all
I can’t let this one go.
That’s not Einstein, that’s Christopher Lloyd as “Doc Brown” in Back To The Future.
His character’s look was likely influenced heavily by Einstein’s appearance, so I guess I see the confusion. But hard to believe you’re old enough to be retired and haven’t seen that movie, or at least references to that character.
Canonically speaking, I think Doc Brown just barely didn’t work with Einstein. He would have worked with Oppenheimer and crew though. He may have even met Einstein.
Where is the canon that explains that? Is there some BTTF official graphic novel or something?
There were some comics, and some cut bits of script and character backstory, that detailed him working for the Manhattan Project, among a lot of other cool bits of Emmet Brown backstory that are probably still around somewhere. A lot of the guys thought Doc Brown was a bit eccentric, because he studied everything he could, refusing to purely specialize.
I guess that explains why the original power source was plutonium.
Thanks for the info! I never knew there was a canon Emmet Brown back story.
This is where my mind went too lmao
Maybe, “Einstein up there” was sarcastic.
My bad, of course I know and love Doc. I guess I’m so old my eyes failed me late at night on my phone. 🥴
He also had a dog called Einstein and said the name quite a few times, which could subliminally add to the confusion when typing about something loosely related.
What’s weird is that I saw the picture and recognised Doc Brown as Doc Brown, but then when I read that response I didn’t notice the wrong name and instead started remembering the picture as Einstein in the same pose and context. Only when I read your response did I realise I’d been tricked. It’s a reminder how easily a person’s mind can be tricked sometimes.
I don’t know what I’m more annoyed at. That you confused Doc from back to the future with Einstein or that as I’ve now seen “speach”, I can’t help but “ew” at “speech” despite first time ever hearing of “speach”. “Speach” is SO much better Dx
Oh God, of course it’s Doc, I was very tired last night. I’m not a huge fan of speach but I kinda like OP’s distinction between public and private speaking. I can even imagine a mnemonic, the ee is the little faces of the audience looking up at Einstein/Doc speechifying, the ea are the two people looking at each other in a conversation.