You can’t spell that without Eli

You can’t spell Wilf Paiement without Eli, or at least you can’t spell it particularly well.

I don’t really watch the NFL.  I might watch half of the Super Bowl but I don’t really care who wins it.  If I want to watch football, I’ll probably check out the CFL, but in truth, I don’t really do much of that either.

So let me say up front that I have no bone to pick with the Jets.  Still, yesterday I saw the comment “You can’t spell ‘Elite’ without ‘Eli'” and it set off a bunch of alarm bells. Now, I like the commenter, but one simply can’t hang a curve like that and not expect someone to mash it.  There are simply too many things out there that can’t be spelled without Eli.  My initial response was that you can’t spell ‘Eliminated’ without Eli either, but I got to wondering: What other words can’t be spelled without Eli?  It made for good discussion on the carpool ride home.

So without further ado, here are a number of other things we came up with that can’t be spelled without ‘Eli’:

• unreliable
• disbelief
• delicate
• he lies
• ineligible
• pelican – apparently, this is gamer slang for someone with a big nose

There were some others that didn’t fit much of a theme, like helicopter, deli, paneling and changeling.  ‘Sacrilege’ was also high on the list until we remembered how to spell it.  The list was tolerable, but I sensed there had to be a lot more.  So I cheated and looked it up.  In about 5 minutes, I found:

• derelict
• delinquent (I was mad we missed this given that we had deli)
• groveling
• homeliest
• relic
• relinquish
• sniveling
• unraveling
• weaseling
• zombielike

So while it’s true that you can’t spell elite without Eli, there are a lot of other things you can’t spell, most of which are far more fun.  🙂

Now, if you don’t focus on the specific order of the E, L and I, the world is your oyster.  There was one, however, that I particularly liked.

You can’t spell ‘incomplete’ without e-l-i.

NHL lockout is now three days and counting and I’m already reduced to this….