January 29, 2007

• English

  English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger;
  neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren’t invented in England
  or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which
  aren’t sweet, are meat. We take English for granted But if we explore its
  paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a
  guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

  And why is it that
  writers write but fingers don’t fing, grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham?
  If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn’t the plural of booth, beeth? One
  goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? Doesn’t it seem
  crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds
  and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

  If
  teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables,
  what does a humanitarian eat? Sometimes I think all the English speakers should
  be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people
  recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship?
  Have noses that run and feet that smell?

   

  How can a slim chance and a fat
  chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? You have to
  marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it
  burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which, an alarm
  goes off by going on.

  English was invented by people, not computers, and
  it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at
  all That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights
  are out, they are invisible.

  PS. – Why doesn’t “Buick” rhyme with
  “quick”

  You lovers of the English
  language might enjoy this

  There is a two-letter word that perhaps has
  more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that is
  “UP.”

  It’s easy to
  understand
  UP, meaning toward the sky or at the
  top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we
  wake
  UP?  At a meeting, why does a
  topic come
  UP?  Why do we
  speak
  UP and why are the
  officers
  UP for election and why is it
  UP to the secretary to
  write
  UP a report?

  We
  call
  UP our friends.  And we use it to
  brighten
  UP a room,
  polish
  UP the

  Silver, we
  warm
  UP the leftovers and
  clean
  UP the kitchen.  We
  lock
  UP the house and some guys
  fix
  UP the old car.  At other times
  the little word has real special meaning.  People stir UP trouble, line
  UP for tickets,
  work
  UP an appetite, and
  think UP
  excuses. To be dressed is one thing, but to be dressed UP is
  special.

  And
  this
  UP is confusing:  A drain must be
  opened
  UP because it is
  stopped UP. We open UP a store in the
  morning but we close it
  UP at night.

  We seem to be pretty
  mixed
  UP about
  UP! To be
  knowledgeable about the proper uses of
  UP, look
  the word
  UP in the dictionary.  In a
  desk-sized dictionary, it takes
  UP almost 1/4th of the page and
  can add
  UP to about thirty definitions. If
  you are
  UP to it, you might try
  building
  UP a list of the many
  ways
  UP is used.  It will
  take
  UP a lot of your time, but if you
  don’t give
  UP, you
  may wind
  UP with a hundred or more. When it
  threatens to rain, we say it is clouding
  UP.  When the sun comes out we say
  it is clearing UP.

  When it
  rains, it wets the earth and often messes things
  UP.

  When it
  doesn’t rain for awhile, things dry
  UP.

  One could go on and on, but I’ll wrap
  it
  UP, for
  now my time is UP
  , so……….. it is time to
  shut
  UP..

   

  • 5:42 am
  • 89 Comments