Sanrio's Cat

Cough. Dough. Coffin. You could probably take a few hours looking up rules and rationales for the pronunciations and spellings for these words. Or you could surrender to the notion that I am currently pleased with: These words exist in their peculiar configurations to confuse kids. Sure, you might be able to research the etymology of a these syllables from ancient civilizations, but just try and tell an eight year old that the English language is made up of the castoffs from hundreds of different tongues and translations that have been massaged and forgotten and remembered until they are all but unrecognizable. If you were ever a kid, you know that language isn't he only thing out there set up to confound you.
Take this for example: "Hello Kitty is not a cat. She's a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She's never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it's called Charmmy Kitty." These were the words offered up to   University of Hawaii Anthropologist Christine R. Yano as she was preparing a Hello Kitty retrospective for the Japanese American National Museum Hello Kitty owners Sanrio. Schrödinger would be so impressed. Hello Kitty is and is not a cat. Tell this to a second grade girl and watch her head explode. Or not. It could be that the only humans ready to accept such a swirling conflict of reality is a child. When I was ten, it never bothered me that Mickey, who was a mouse, had a pet dog. On top of that mild twist, add the additional two or three turns that come with the acceptance of that same mouse having a best friend named Goofy, who walks around on two legs and wears clothes and speaks in a language understood by Mickey and the rest of us as English, who also happens to be a dog. This hole in the fabric of the universe could only exist in a world where that sort of thing was commonplace. The kind of world where Teenage Turtles can be both mutated and highly trained martial arts experts. As an adult, I would expect that the "mutant" part would be sufficient to explain any special talents or variations in size, shape or color. 
This is why we try to teach this stuff to kids. Applying an order to the world is our job as grownups. If we tell them that "shun" means to "push away," we don't have to explain the word "confusion." It simply is what it is. It doesn't mean to push away confusion. That would be ridiculous. That sort of thing makes sense to us. If you happen to be over twelve years of age.