Here's the thing: spelling rules are context-sensitive, and if you actually understand the underlying sound rules, spelling in English is often not that bad. For example, there is a fricatization process for /t/ and /s/ sounds convert to a /ʃ/ or a /ʒ/--this is how "-tion" is pronounced /ʃən/. Or the tendency of multiple consonants in a cluster to all be voiced or unvoiced (hence why dogs is pronounced /dogz/ and not /dogs/). Even consider the velarization of "n" in the "-ing" suffix, which is pronunced /ŋg/ and not /ng/ (try actually pronouncing /ng/! It's not easy).

I'm not aware of any spelling reforms that would propose to fix the last two examples I give, but the fricatization changes is often one of most common ones people suggest changing. That's a sign that people are willing to tolerate some degree of phonetic inaccuracies.

The real issue with English is our tendency to adopt foreign words with foreign pronunciations, foreign spellings, and sometimes even foreign morphology. And sometimes we even botch that--witness words like "gyro" or "ginkgo". This means that trying to pronounce unusual words often means first guessing what language the words (or even morphemes!) comes from, and then internalizing some bastardized form of that foreign language's phonology.

Given how useful writing is, I just feel we should be asking ourselves whether any part of the process could be simplified.

"It isn't true, but if it could be, wouldn't that be a scandal?"

There's a name for thoughts like that, I just know it.

> Could it not be improved?

Yes, it can be improved. It can be improved multiple ways along multiple axes, whether you wish to emphasize etymology (to help foreign learners) or phonemic fidelity or phonetic fidelity or don't know the difference between phonemic and phonetic and just want words to be spelled like you say them, and those buffoons from across the ocean can suck eggs if the spelling gets all fouled up for them and their silly accents.

It's impossible to satisfy everyone. Once you propose any kind of improvement, therefore, everyone comes out of the woodwork to improve the improvement, leading to something which satisfies no one, because no one feels perfectly well-served. "Utopia Or Bust!" sounds good until you realize other people apparently want to lead you to perdition.

Maybe this is why I am so angry with this article. They could have picked less artificial example to demonstrate irregularities.

What should we infer from this? To one way of thinking, the "-ough" suffix is "uff"... well, mostly... and this says nothing about (say) "gh" as a prefix, which has its own rules. But to another, clearly "gh" can sometimes be pronounced "f"; and, since we have "tough" and "bough", by extension we can assume nothing from (say) "ghost".

Either way, whatever you think of "ghoti", "bough" vs "tough" is (in my view) enough to demonstrate that the current state of affairs is what you might well spell "er kluctureghoucc".