Kitchen Towel Coloring

After wondering why so many kitchen towels have a stripe of red on them, I was unwilling to use "Style" as the easy answer. After all, this use of color prevents the towels from being easily bleached if they're stained, and doesn't explain the ubiquity of the coloration.

Rather, coloring a part of the towel shows dirtiness not often present outside the kitchen: white powders. Salt, flour, sugar, and various other commonplace baking ingredients would be difficult to see on a pure white towel, but are easily apparent if there's a streak of color on the towel.

Reinforced Lies of E's and I's

As the common saying goes

"i" before "e" except after "c", or when sounding like "ey" as in "neighbor" or "weigh"

Due to the weirdly high number of exceptions, I figured it would be interesting to write a quick program in order to find out how often this is true.

I used CMU Pronouncing Dictionary for pronunciation and a basic English word list; when cross-referenced this produced a list of 31,500 English word/pronunciation pairs. Of these:

• 630 words had "ie"
• 233 words had "ei"
• 207 words had "ei", but no preceding "c"
• 132 words had "ei", no preceding "c", and no "ey" sound, e.g. "being"
• 75 words had "ei", no preceding "c", but did have an "ey" sound, e.g. "weigh"*
• 46 words had "cie", e.g. "ancient", "glacier", and "science"
• 26 words had "cei", e.g. "ceiling", "deceit", and "receive" 

It seems the qualifications to this basic spelling rule are worse than useless, they're harmful! While the general rule of "i before e" holds true, almost twice as many words break both qualifying clauses as follow them.

• 46 words break the "c" part of the rule, but only 26 follow it.
• 132 words break the "sounds like 'ey'" part, but fewer than 75 follow it.*

* Some words that have "ei" were improperly flagged as having an "ey" sound, e.g. "reinterpretation." While there is an "ey" sound, it's not produced by the "ei" combination.