Don't
You Love The English Language?
We'll begin with
a box, and the plural is boxes;
But the plural
of ox became oxen not oxes.
One fowl is a
goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural
of moose should never be meese.
You may find a
lone mouse or a nest full of mice;
Yet the plural
of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of
man is always called men,
Why shouldn't
the plural of pan be called pen?
If I spoke of my
foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a
boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a
tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't
the plural of booth be called beeth?
Then one may be
that, and three would be those,
yet hat in the
plural would never be hose,
and the plural
of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a
brother and also of brethren,
but though we
say mother, we never say methren.
Then the
masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
but imagine the
feminine she, shis and shim.
Some other
reasons to be grateful if you grew up speaking English:
1) The bandage
was wound around the wound
2) The farm was
used to produce produce.
3) The dump was
so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
4) We must
polish the Polish Furniture.
5 ) He
could lead if he would get the lead out.
6) The soldier
decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
7) Since there
is no time like the present, he thought it was time to
present the present.
8) At the Army
base, a bass was painted on the head of a bass drum.
9) When shot at,
the dove dove into the bushes.
10) I did not
object to the object.
11) The
insurance was invalid for the invalid
12) There was a
row among the oarsman about how to row.
13) They were
too close to the door to close it.
14) The buck
does funny things when the does are present
15) A seamstress
and a sewer fell down into the sewer line.
16) To help with
planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
17) The wind was
too strong to wind the sail
18) After a
number of Novocain injections, my jaw got number
19) Upon
seeing the tear in the painting, I shed a tear.
20) I had to
subject the subject to a series of tests.
21)How can I
intimate this to my most intimate friend?
22)The wind
winds the windmill.
Screwy
pronunciations can mess up your mind!
For
example.....if you have a rough cough, climbing can be tough when
going through the bough on a tree!
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.
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?
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
don't preachers praught? If a vegetarian
eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
Sometimes I
think all the folks who grew up speaking English should
be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.
In what other
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 wiseguy 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.
