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Shall I? Oh, I do think I shall.rubs hands togetherWe’re doing the long answer today, kids.Where better to start our story than a full millennium ago, long before the letter J existed, with some Irish monks who were on a mission: de-paganize the Anglo-Saxons. You know, make them Christian, give them a Bible, et cetera. All that fun monk-y business. Should be a fairly easy task, shouldn’t it? All they need to do is……well, they need to invent the English alphabet in order to write said Bible, actually. That’s quite a big first step. The monks had their own variant of the Latin alphabet, but when it comes to pronunciation Latin and Old English have some pretty significant differences. Differences like:Old English has a “th” sound that Latin doesn’t haveOld English has a “gh” sound that Latin doesn’t haveOld English has an “sh” sound that Latin doesn’t haveOld English has many vowels that Latin doesn’t haveAnd, most importantly for the answer here, Old English has this funny set of “ch”/“j” sounds that Latin doesn’t have - or, at least, didn’t have. The Romance languages are slowly developing their own set of “ch”/“j” sounds, and they’ve got some problems when it comes to their written language, too - see here and here for the story on those.The Anglo-Saxons already had an alphabet, a variation on the Runes, that their Germanic ancestors had long ago stolen from the Etruscans. Few of the Angles or Saxons were literate, so Runic inscriptions in Old English, like the Franks Casket below, are rare.The Franks Casket, with an inscription in Old English. Image from Omniglot.The monks could have kept the Saxon runes, but they opted to use the Latin alphabet instead. The Roman script was more closely associated with the Church, whereas the pagan Germanic runes were, well, pagan - the monks wanted nothing to do with them. A proper Latinate spelling system was in order.Some elements of creating the spelling system were easy, since they could be mapped directly from Latin. Others were harder, and new letters had to be added. There were some cases, though, that didn’t quite fit either category: rather than simply mapping or adding letters, combinations of letters were created. One example is th, used early on in Old English and then later again in Middle and Modern English.The other combination sound was cg, for the sound we’d spell “j” today: brycg and hecg, for example. Later on in the Old English period, you could also find it spelled dg - hence brydg and hedg, soon to become bridge and hedge.Suddenly, the French appear! The Normans invade, create and then promptly break the Middle English spelling system, and also throw lots of new words at the English. French had been on a palatalization adventure of its own, leaving them with some fun sounds - like the “j” sound, for instance.There were two places French got its “j” sounds from. The first was out of Latin’s “i” sound. Latin did not have a “j” sound, so there was no need for it to have a J in its alphabet in the first place. The letter J of the 13th century was nothing more than a funny-looking letter I. “Jesus” and “Julius” were spelled “Iesus” and “Iulius”.A manuscript written in Latin: the name “Joseph” is spelled ioseph here. Image from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.Problems arose when French developed that terribly un-Latin-y “j” sound out of Latin’s “i” sound: what would have been pronounced “Iesus” or “Yesus” in Latin was “Jesus” in French. It was still spelled “Iesus”, though, leading to plenty of confusion that was only ever resolved when J finally got its place in the alphabet.The other way French got the “j” sound, and the other Romance languages with it, was by shifting around its “g” sound. In Latin, whenever you saw a G, you would always know to pronounce it “hard” - i.e., always as in “go” or “game”, never as in “gem” or “gym”. French, of course, would have none of this.If you say “ga”, “go”, and “gu”, and then say “gi” and “ge”, you’ll notice that your tongue reaches much further forward when you say “gi” and “ge” than when you say “ga”, “go”, and “gu”. This is because A, O, and U are the so-called back vowels, since they’re pronounced at the back of your mouth, and your tongue can rest perfectly fine back there: “g” and “o” are both pronounced further back.But when you say “gi” or “ge”, your tongue moves forward. I and E are front vowels, so your tongue needs to swiftly move from pronouncing the “g” sound at the back of your mouth up to pronouncing the front vowel “e”. To make this journey easier, the “g” in “ge” is held a little further forward than it would be in “ga”.French simply continued this trend even further: it pushed “g” up so far before “e” and “i” that it turned into a “j” sound. Again, instead of inventing a new letter, they kept the spelling: when we pronounce “gem” as “jem” instead of, well, “gem” (with a hard “g”), we can blame the French.Most of the other Romance languages did this, too, and it leaked into how people pronounced Latin words. When English started borrowing Latin word after Latin word during the Renaissance, we didn’t pronounce “refrigerate” or “frigid” with the original hard “g”; no, we went with the French way of the soft “g”: refrijerate, frijid.While all this was going on, and while the Middle and Early Modern Englishes were developing a spelling system to deal with all the French and Latin words pouring in, we still had our Old English way of spelling things. The French had influenced and edited that Germanic system, but it wasn’t entirely alien from the system used centuries ago. We retain more than a few Old English elements in Modern English spelling - the “ea” of “meat”, the “th” of “thing”, and the “dg” of “bridge”.These two systems work together - less than harmoniously, as anyone who’s ever learned to spell in English will tell you - to produce our messy writing system. The ultimate outcome of the last several paragraphs is this set of convoluted rules governing how to spell the “j” sound:If there’s a “j” sound at the start of a word, and if it comes before an “o”, “a”, or “u”, spell it with a “j”. You couldn’t spell it with a “g” because there was never any sound-pulling with “go”, “ga”, or “gu”, as covered above.Eg. joke, jab, jumpIf there’s a “j” sound at the start of a word, and if it comes before an “e”, “i”, or “y”, spell it with either a “j” or a “g”. This relies on the word’s etymology and so there’s no real good way to accurately predict which one to use.Eg. jet, gem, jiffy, gibberish, gym, gifIf there’s a “j” sound in the middle of a word, good luck. We’ve stolen so many words with so many different stories behind them that there’s no telling when you’ll have “frigid”, “fidget”, or “major”.If there’s a “j” sound at the end of a word that has more than one syllable, spell it with “ge”. Most long words containing the “j” sound in this position are either directly from or were otherwise influenced by French, so French spelling rules are used in these cases.Eg. courage, centrifuge, averageIf there’s a “j” sound at the end of a word that has only one syllable, and if the vowel immediately preceding it is a long vowel or if there’s an “n”, “l”, or “r”, spell it with “ge”.Eg. rage, page, change, orange, strange, bulge, indulgeIf there’s a “j” sound at the end of a word that has only one syllable, and if the vowel immediately preceding it is a short vowel, spell it with “dge”. With a few exceptions, only short Germanic words - or words that seem like they could be short Germanic words - retain the “dg” spelling.Eg. judge, bridge, badge, lodge, hedgeDepressing, I know. This doesn’t even get to most of the exceptions.Yet, despite this monstrosity of an orthography, most English speakers know these rules. Once we’ve learned them thoroughly, they seem obvious. When we got the word juge from French, it wasn’t too long before it was regularized to the modern spelling “judge”.And this is exactly what happened with “fridge”. When “refrigerator” - with some help from the brand name Frigidaire - was shortened, there was no way it could have been spelled “frige”. A millennium of French, Latin, and Old English spelling working together prevents this: the word looks French, so you expect to pronounce it something like “frizh” or “freezh” or “fraizh” using the French/Latin system. (See also here.)This leaves only one option for how to spell “fridge” - namely, well, “fridge”. It has one syllable and a short vowel, so it gets an extra “d” there to make it fit with how we do things in English. “Refrigerator” doesn’t have a “d”, because there’s no confusion that could have come from it; besides, English and French like to keep words relatively similar in spelling to their Latin ancestors.To answer your question, there is no “d” in “refrigerator” because it’s a loanword from Latin, but pronounced according to the pronunciation rules of the later Romance languages; there is a “d” in “fridge” because, as a short word with a short vowel, it’s subject to our original set of Germanic spelling rules rather than our Latinate spelling rules.Thanks for asking!

I had just arrived at my hotel in the Philippines after a 21 hour journey. After checking in I was shown to my room, I opened up my laptop to download mail and put my iPad on charge. I also placed a box of chocolates in the fridge. I then went out to get a meal at the restaurant. After the meal I returned to my room. Upon entering I just knew someone had been in there, but everything looked to be in place. I decided that I would check my emails and opened up my laptop and was immediately puzzled as I didn’t recognise the page, which was now in Tagalog. A quick look at the history showed that a number of facebook and other pages had been opened. I called the reception but they insisted that no one had entered my room. I then sat back to watch a movie on tv and fancied a chocolate treat. I removed the box from the fridge. What should have been a new box of chocolates now contained only 5 !Needless to say I left the hotel the next morning never to return.That incident occurred in what was meant to be a 4 star hotel, I moved to a more modest establishment, where I found the staff were very welcoming , and gave me no concerns. I have returned to this hotel ever since.What have I learned, that generally most hotel staff are honest, and welcoming, you may get the odd member of staff who is tempted (Regardless of class of hotel). I never leave valuables on show in my room, everything is locked away.

Tomorrow is MondayNO internet connectionPage cannot be displayedNO food in fridgeLow account balanceBills due5% battery remainingI was kidding!I love you, but as a friendGoodbye and have a good lifeTo be continued….