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Did you think English was an easy language?

prl 72

Can you read these right the first time?

The bandage was wound around the wound.
The farm was used to produce produce.
The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
We must polish the Polish furniture.
He could lead if he would get the lead out.
The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present. red for you
A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
I did not object to the object.
The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
They were too close to the door to close it.
The buck does funny things when the does are present.
A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
Upon seeing the tear in the painting, I shed a tear.
I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?

Let's face it, 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 nor 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? If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? 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?

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? red for me

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 toward 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. We use something to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, 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.

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

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.

We could go on, but I'll wrap it UP, for now my time is UP; so: Time to shut UP!

Oh… one more thing: What are the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do at night? U–P

PS: BTW I found this message in my inbox this morning and it gave me a chuckle, thought I'd share it with you. hope it brought smiles to you too..

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72 comments
hshfdhds

english is not a hard language. the most other languages are a lot more difficult.I´m not the best in english,but I´m learning english,russian and hungarian,and speak fluently german and croatian.I can only say that every of the other mentioned language is more difficult

Fred

What’s particularly hard about German, as far as I can tell, is that most of the verbs you need on an everyday basis are irregular verbs. The uncommon ones are often regular but the ones that you use constantly are not. Then again, that’s the same for English: to go, to be, to have… all irregular verbs.

Another thing that’s mind-boggling for English native speakers are the three genders in German, and what makes them even harder is that many of them are just plain arbitrary, like door, chair, tree, … all of which come with a (male or female) gender assigned in German, none of which make much sense.

Fred’s last blog post..Need A Sysadmin?

Rob2.0

This is, quite honestly, one of the best posts I’ve read on any blog in years.

Rob2.0’s last blog post..Grasshoppers Demi Ribbon Espresso

Ramiro

I was able to read all the lines without any trouble. I did have to ponder the meaning of the row sentence, I wasn’t sure if I was pronouncing it right or if there was another use for the word that I was not familiar with, as it stands I left it at row. Truthfully I don’t understand your trouble with up. It’s a wonderful and clearly versatile word who’s many implications help the English speaking populous determine when things need to be brought to attention, increased in temp, secured, or made open.

I could go on and on, in fact I could likely find a logical reason for every one of its uses, one that my generation is keenly familiar with is the 1-up when gaining a “life” in a video game. Furthermore at the end you just use up as many times as you could conceive to, to stress the point that we as English users can use it a lot.

One could make a case that English in all its eccentricities quizzical qualities, is proof in itself that if you can be called articulate that you are a master of the the stupefying and befuddling.

Word.

RMC

Suzanne

I was having trouble getting my son to close the car window, so in the end I said “I want the window up – U P up”.
He looked at me and said, “No I don’t, I P down”. He’s 35 now, and still a smart alec!

Danko

For me, as an Serbian, English is difficult to learn, because our language is simple to write and to read. Every voice has one letter. We wrote as we speaks and read as is written. No spell troubles. In some grammatical matters Serbian language is easier to learn, in some are not.

Lisa

Two points, though I know they’re small compared to the rest of the language: eggplants used to look like eggs (I’ve seen the heirloom plants and the name make so much more sense now). Those purple things are aubergines, and aubergines and eggplants are not quite the same thing. Also, hamburgers are named that because they’re from Hamburg Germany (-er being a German suffix used much like the -er in “New Yorker”, or the -an in “Chicagoan”).

And the main reason English is so messed up is that it doesn’t have a single source. French, Spanish, Italian and Romanian all come from Latin; Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew and Arabic have been they way they are since the beginning of time, it sometimes seems; while English is a mutt. We get Saxon, French, Gaelic and Norse mixed in with the scholars’ need to throw around Latin and Greek, plus words with the same root will enter usage at different times from sightly different places, and it’s no wonder it’s so dang hard to understand.

Anyway, thanks for letting a history major and etymology fan ramble. It’s a fun post.

Tahirih

As a Speech Language Pathologist for the most concrete language learners in the world, children with autism, I have noticed how hard many words are but this brought a new word to my attention. I guess I only teach the directional meaning intentionally. It would take forever to teach all these meanings.

Tahirih’s last blog post..Tools of the Mind

deb

check out “up” (and any other word) here–a very cool site that shows the relationships between different meanings of a word:
http://www.visuwords.com/

nope

Up in almost all phrases where it seems nonsensical is. Wake up. Wake. Call up. Call. Think up. Think. Superfluous positivism, as well as slang, at it’s best. What time is it now? What time is it? What is the time?

It (the concept of grammatical error) is simply an improper abuse of slang.

Give it up or give it away? Up, up and away!

The English language doesn’t need to make grammatical sense because the people who speak it are(n’t) morons. Grammatical errors in a sentence, do not, I repeat do not, mean that the word has an infinitive quality. If the definition of a word must alter itself to make sense, then the sentence itself is in err. Up isn’t special, merely vague at best.

Swear words work on the same principle. That is why they are faux pas. Not because they express anger. It is because in a moment of emotional involvement, words leave you, so, sometimes things get thrown in (usually vague terms) that don’t belong.

So if you happen to write something containing ‘it’ or ‘up’ or any other variant of this plague, destroy the sentence. Start again. Unless, of course it is in conversation, you don’t want your characters coming as wooden pompous jerks would you?

=)