And as anyone in earshot will often hear me loudly and proudly, maybe even a little flamboyantly, proclaim, I Was an English Major. As such I'd like to devote a little cyber-space to me waxing rhapsodaisically about my favorite of all languages, English!
It's the poor bastard child of many parents, the linguistic equivalent of growing up FLDS. It has just under four times as many words as does French, and while francophones go on and on about how idiomatic their tongue is, English not only buries them, it takes them over preemptively. There are expressions in English that are used in microcultures, ones that you may never hear until they somehow float into your awareness through books, papers, broadcasts, along with their mutations, some of which make sense, some of which clearly don't. "Like a kid in a candy shop." "Dumb as a brick." "Hit with the ugly stick." "Hit every branch falling off the ugly tree." "Kitty-corner", "katty-corner", and "cater-corner", all meaning diagonally situated. Or "cater-wumped", meaning turned-about. "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth." One of my new favorites is to describe moments of weakness by telling someone, "you folded faster than Superman on laundry day."
This sort of richness may explain why foreigners, ESL'ers like Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, and Andre Codrescu chose to write in a tongue not their mothers', a palette of colors available to them in English that wasn't in their native languages. Hmmm, maybe that's the reason why Samuel Beckett decided to write in French, an intriguing thought.
Of course, students of English have to get by the beguiling spelling problems the language has, which, like traffic in Bombay, obeys no rules... usually. Like, how do you pronounce "cough", "bough", "though", "tough", and "through"? Who would have thought? No rules. Or most of the time, you'd say the "tw" the same way, as in "twill", "twine", "twain" and "twee", but poor old "two" gets second place pronunciation and nothing but trouble. You'd like "lead by example" but not be "rigid as a lead pipe." Nor do you want to read what you've already read. Of course, any time anyone tries to teach you a rule, like "I before E except after C," some sleight of hand introduces another exception.
Politicians give us neologisms like "normalcy", "misunderestimate" and "refudiate", as well as new uses for old words that seem wrong but lack robust grounds for objection, like "growing our economy." Speling is, of course, important - you want to shoot ordnance and write ordinances (although perhaps you'd want to use ordnance on an ordinance), eat a kernel and salute a colonel, and know if you're there, it's theirs, if the fowl is foul, if you've got caulk or... never mind. And don't get me started on grammars, because, look, pardon my French, but as failbook has taught us, there's a pretty important distinction between "f*ckin' a, dude!" and "f*ckin' a dude!"
Toss into the mix English's globality - it's a Language Without Borders (N.B.: Doctors Without Borders = good. Doctors Without Boundaries = bad.) - and you get England and America, two countries separated by a common language, and the celebratory confusion which may-in-fact-be-purposeful-but-likely-isn't of Engrish, and you get a neo-Babel ziggurat that is the perfect reflection of and monument to the befuddling of diplomacy, commerce, and fiendships - ahem, friendships - that characterize our postmodern world.
Ingliche iz phun!
*So, I refuse to italicize "foreign" words and phrases like "raison d'etre" if they're in common use in English. My rationale is that if they're in common use, they're ours now, dammit - I drink your linguistic milkshake!
DOCTORS WHO WRITE AND DO NOT SUCK:
Stephen Bergman, AKA Samuel Shem (The House of God)
Ethan Canin
Abraham Verghese
Anton Chekhov
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Khaled Hosseini
John Keats
Stanislaw Lem
W. Somerset Maugham
DOCTORS WHO WRITE AND PUBLISH THEMSELVES LIKE TOTALLY FOR FREE ON BLOGSPOT:
You can thank me later.
Dam Hilly Run:
Who knew there was a dam in Fullerton?
7.07 mi. 1 hr:02 min:06 sec. 8:42 pace.
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