Q. "I before E except after C." What thanks do schoolkids owe the originator of this famous mnemonic device for spelling words like "receive," "deceive," "conceive," "conceit," "ceiling"?

A: No thanks at all for this anCIEnt, unsCIEntific, ineffiCIEnt, insuffiCIEnt and defiCIEnt rule! NEIther should kids try to rule-spell "finanCIEr," "soCIEty," "juiCIEr," nor anything in the group of "EIght," "bEIge," "nEIghbor," "codEIne," "protEIn," "rEIgn," "sEIze," "thEIr," "wEIgh" and "wEIrd."

There are well over 100 such exceptions, says David Crystal in "The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language," with IE following C, or EI following just about anything it chooses. The only way to impose a degree of order on this muddle is to relate spellings to grammar and pronunciation, such as exceptions involving affixes (agencies, seeing, absenteeism) or proper names (Einstein, O'Neill, Leicester), or how the IE/EI is sounded, such as in an unstressed syllable of "ancient."