English – our tangled, twisted, tortured language

This trouble with English

 

Photo by Warren Umoh on Unsplash

Tim Wilson 

I have two 6-year-old grandsons who I am proud to say are eager to read. Unfortunately, they are trying to read English. 

It does not take long for even 6-year-olds to recognize the written word in English often makes no sense. Try as they might the language works against them. 

For starters, there are the words with letters thrown in randomly for no apparent reason. Why does “know” need a K that is silent? Why does “why” need an H? Who decided to stick a G and H together and say they sound like an F? And why do they get plopped in the middle of other words such as bright or light or night, and serve no purpose? 

I remember years ago some TV talk show host, maybe Johnny Carson, had a guest on to discuss the oddities of the English language. This linguist explained how you could spell fish G-H-O-T-I. Just take the GH from “tough” or “rough”, take the O from “women”, and the TI from “action”, and GHOTI reads and sounds just like FISH. 

“The Examples of crazy spellings are endless…” 

The examples of crazy spellings are endless but that just scratches the surface of the insanity of English. It’s not just how the words are put together. The next level of nuttiness comes with the meanings we attach to words and how we use them in ways that defy logic. 

Remember the comedian, David Brenner? He was great at pointing out words that don’t make sense. One of his best observations was this: Why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway? 

Then there are the words that are spelled differently, sound the same and have wildly different meanings. I give you BEER, BARE and BEAR. This can lead to such sentences as: “I ran bare ass into the woods with a beer in my hand after a bear stuck its head into our party tent.” Perfectly clear when you read it but when spoken it’s a little bizarre. 

Here’s another one. “They’re driving their car there.” Imagine someone hearing that while trying to learn English as a second language. Imagine them hearing that said with a Boston accent. 

Then there are the conventions or rules in applying meaning in English that get tossed aside randomly. Take the adjectives strong and hard, and the adverbs strongly and hardly. When you say something is “running strong” or “strongly running”, you pretty much mean the same thing. But if you tell a boss one employee is “working hard” while another is “hardly working”, the first guy will get a pat on the back while the other gets a kick in the ass. 

“This trouble with English….” 

This trouble with English is not entirely the fault of the language. There’s also the never-ending desire on some to insist on turning perfectly good nouns into verbs because they think they are being concise. I think they’re being pompous. Why give someone an incentive when you can “incentivize” them? We could come up with an idea or even brainstorm, but don’t we sound so much smarter when we say let’s “ideate.” No, we sound like we should be jailed for linguistic abuse. 

There’s another dimension of wackiness with words when we venture into slang. I remember in the early ‘80s when me and a couple of buddies met a guy our age touring North America with a very early version of a digital translator. We were all single in our early ‘20s so we shared the common interest of women in their early ‘20s. Yujiro was trying to get a handle on American slang so one of his first questions was about what we called an attractive woman. In that era the go-to term was fox, so that’s what we told Yujiro. He typed it into his translator, looked up with a smile and said, “Oh, you mean like dog.” Not being cruel, we immediately straightened him out on that. 

Now fox and dog may not be used interchangeably. but there are two slang terms that are, despite their actual meanings being polar opposites. 

When you use the slang expressions that something “blows” or “sucks”, you mean the same thing – it stinks, it’s lousy, it’s the worst, etc. But what would happen if you ignored the original meanings and exchanged one for the other? Picture a family gathered around the dining room table to celebrate their matriarch’s 80^th spin around the sun. After a rousing chorus of “Happy Birthday”, what if the next thing you heard was someone exclaiming cheerfully, “OK, Grandma, time to suck out the candles!” 

It would be painful on many levels. 

About the author: Tim Wilson is a lifelong resident of Massachusetts. He is passionate about his family, Marquette University, bicycling and all Boston sports.