License Plates and Language

CheeseWiz (or Chez using French)

Environmentalists have a very conflicted relationship with their cars.-Tom Arnold

To help keep me awake when driving long distances I like to make words from license plates I see. The rules are this: keep the letters in the order you see and add the fewest additional letters to make a word.

Here are some examples from this morning:

A truck plate had just two letters. Easy!, I thought. But the letters CJ made me think a bit until I came up with cajole. Later I thought of cajun.

Some plates are hopeless - what can you do with XNK?

Some plates are easy like EER. Sadly my first thought was beer, then deer and then I wondered, just how common is this pattern? Sometimes in the license plate game I discover a letter pattern that is rare in the English language like CJ; other times I find popular letter combinations.

Allowing for spelling variations, the <ir> sound is very common indeed:
beer
bleary
clear
deer
dreary
ear
fear
gear
hear
jeer
Kir (a French cocktail made with blackcurrant liqueur)
Kirsh (Swedish Cherry liqueur used in fondue)
mere
near
pier, peer
queer
rear
seer, sear
steer,
smear
tier, Tir (Norse god), tear
veer
weir (a river dam)
year
The only simple consonant + <ir> combination that is missing is <z><ir>. I Googled "Zir" and found that some have proposed this unused word as a gender-neutral pronoun so we can stop saying him/her in writing.

Bottom Line

I love linguistics, the study of language. This was my minor in graduate school while I majored in mathematics. You might think the <ir> list above is "obvious". Any simple vowel + consonant will have a long list of words. Consider <ar> (car, mar, jar) or <at> (cat, mat, rat). But <ir> is not a simple sound. We usually think of it as one syllable but it really has two parts smeared together.

Say "tear". The mouth starts with TE like tea then shifts to (e)R like the sound in jerk.
With a  simple vowel you can make the sound continuously until you run out of breath.
<aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa>
<ooooooooooooooooooooo>
Ditto for some asperants like <sssssssssssssssssssssssss>

With "tear" I can stretch it out as
<TEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE> <(e)RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR>
The 'i' is a funny two part vowel E(eh). Complex but apparently quite natural to the English tongue. It reminds me of the two part sound of "yu" in yuck; feel your tongue move as you it.