Did you know that tough used to be spelled tuff? It's not anymore. Do you know why? There's a story:
So one day, I was walking along, and some guy said to me, "Hey, you look pretty tuff!"
"Yeah, I am," I said, while eating a sandwich made of barbed wire and knives.
"If you're so tuff, you should enter the Tuff Tournament for Tuff Guys," the stranger said.
"Word," I responded solemnly, then something behind me exploded. I'm not sure what it was, because I didn't look at it.
I began a rigorous hourly training routine that evening. I won't get into the nitty gritty details, but it involved a grizzly bear, two bengal tigers, a large cage that was almost as tuff as I was, and my fists. Since I trained for about 90 minutes per hour, I actually had to slow down time in order to fulfill my entire training routine every hour. That wasn't a problem though, because whereas most people are 70% water, I'm 70% diamonds, and I sweat uranium, so the extreme density of my body composition causes a quantum lag in the passage of time that makes everything around me occur at about half speed. I'm kind of like a black hole but a lot more attractive.
Well, the day of the tournament came around and it turned out that guy was just pulling my leg. Since me and my gratuitous amounts of tuffness were the only viable competitors that showed up, I fought tuffness itself. And won. Not only did I win, but I won so hard that every time it shows its face in public, it says "ugh", remembering how brutally I defeated it. So now it's spelled tough, because yeah, I'm tougher than phonetics, and I'm a lot tougher than a car door.