HUMOUR #5: The Lunacy That Is English (Part 2)

Living abroad, I'm amazed at just how many people in the world are speaking my mother tongue. However, do they really understand it? I mean, do you they really understand the complexities of English, it's many exceptions and it's versatility in terms of expression? Here's some examples that you can test your foreign friends with:-

Some reasons to be grateful if you grew up speaking English:

- 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.
- After a number of Novocain injections, my jaw got number.
- 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?
- I spent last evening evening out a pile of dirt.

- "If you have a rough cough, climbing can be tough when going through the bough on a tree!"

- "There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple".

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 didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? 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 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!!

The first Lunacy That Is English entry was here