By Anoop Bose, Advocate, Supreme Court of India
English is the most universal language in the world, employed in some way or the other by at least one out of every seven members of the human race around the globe.
In 1962, the internationally acclaimed American scholar, writer and linguist Lincoln Kinnear Barnett aptly remarked in Life Magazine, ‘English is a language easy to learn but maddening to master.’ Barnett’s remark had much more than a ring of truth about it!
The venerable English crime writer, poet, playwright and essayist Dorothy Leigh Sayers jocularly observed, ‘The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.’
English is undoubtedly the craziest language in the world which is often described as ‘our wonderful erratic tongue’. The exasperating inconsistencies, oddities and anomalies in the language are all too apparent! In what other language:
- Do we play at a recital and recite at a play?
- Do we park in a driveway and drive in a parkway?
- Do we pack suits in a garment bag and garments in a suitcase?
- Do we call it newsprint when it contains no printing but when we put print on it we call it a newspaper?
- Do we call it shipment when we transport something by car and cargo when we transport it by ship?
- Do we call food servers waiters when it’s the customers who do the waiting?
- Do we wear a pair of pants but not a pair of shirts?
- Do we inoculate for typhoid and not against typhoid?
- Do we call it hamburger when it contains no ham?
- Do we call it pineapple when it contains neither pine nor apple?
- Do we call it eggplant when it has no egg in it?
- Do we put up the shutters when business closes?
Do we fill in a form by filling it out?
When we examine the glaring vagaries and paradoxes of the English language, we amusingly discover that hot dogs can be cold, darkrooms can be lit, morning sickness and daydreaming can occur at night, nightmares can occur even in broad daylight, tomboys are girls, quicksand works slowly, boxing rings are square, a man can father a movement but a woman can’t mother one, a king rules a kingdom but a queen doesn’t rule a ‘queendom’ and a woman can man a station but a man can’t woman one!
The English language is infested with downright insane conundrums. Why is it that a woman can be a vision, but not a sight, unless your eyes begin to hurt? Then, she can be ‘a sight for sore eyes’ if she is a beautiful woman!
If we ring a bell today and rang a bell yesterday, why don’t we say that we ‘flang’ a ball? If the teacher taught, why don’t we say that the preacher ‘praught’? Why is it that the sun shone yesterday while we shined our shoes and we treaded water and then trod on the beach?
We all know that a writer is someone who writes and a stinger is something that stings. But fingers don’t ‘fing’, haberdashers don’t ‘haberdash’, grocers don’t ‘groce’, hammers don’t ‘ham’, humdingers don’t ‘humding’ and ushers don’t ‘ush’.
If the plural of tooth is teeth, shouldn’t the plural of booth be ‘beeth’? If the plural of house is houses, shouldn’t the plural of mouse be ‘mouses’ and not mice? Or shouldn’t the plural of house be ‘hice’? If the plural of box is boxes, shouldn’t the plural of ox be ‘oxes’ and not oxen? One goose, two geese – but why not one moose, two ‘meese’? If the plural of man is men, shouldn’t the plural of pan be ‘pen’?
A slim chance and a fat chance mean the same thing, as are a bad licking and a good licking, a caregiver and a caretaker and ‘What’s going on?’ and ‘What’s coming off?’ If fatty means ‘full of fat,’ shouldn’t skinny mean ‘full of skin’? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
How can sharp speech and blunt speech be the same and quite a lot and quite a few the same, while overlook and oversee are opposites? How can the weather be hot as hell one day and cold as hell the very next day?
If button and unbutton and tie and untie are opposites, why do ravel and unravel and loosen and unloosen mean the same thing? If bad is the opposite of good, hard the opposite of soft and up the opposite of down, why are badly and goodly, hardly and softly, and upright and downright not opposing pairs?
If harmless actions are the opposite of harmful actions, why are shameful and shameless behaviour the same? If appropriate and inappropriate remarks and passable and impassable mountain trails are opposites, why do flammable and inflammable materials, heritable and inheritable property and passive and impassive persons mean the same?
Why is it that when the sun or the moon or the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible? How can valuable objects be less valuable than invaluable ones? If uplift is the same as lift up, why are upset and set up opposite in meaning?
Why are pertinent and impertinent, canny and uncanny and famous and infamous neither opposites nor the same? Why do we wind up our watches when we start them ticking? How is it easier to assent than to dissent but harder to ascend than to descend? Why does day break but never fall and night falls but never breaks?
Let’s take a glance at some popular English phrases that mean just the opposite or something very different from what they actually mean:
‘I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth.’ Ever since the legendary Italian explorer, navigator and coloniser Christopher Columbus sailed the seas we have known that the earth doesn’t have any ends. The earth is simply spherical!
The movie kept me literally glued to my seat. The chances of our posterior being stuck to a seat are about as remote as the chances of our ‘rolling in the aisles’ while watching a hilarious movie or ‘drowning in tears’ while watching a melancholy one!
I could care less. What we really mean is ‘I couldn’t care less’, but then why do we delete the negative from this statement?
A hot water heater. Who heats hot water anyway? This is similar to garbage disposal; the stuff isn’t garbage until after we dispose it off!
A hot cup of coffee. Are we bothered if the cup is hot? We obviously mean a cup of hot coffee!
I want to have my cake and eat it too. Doesn’t this phrase actually mean ‘I want to eat my cake and have it too’?
It’s neither here nor there. Then where is it?
Extraordinary. If ‘extra-large’ means ‘even larger than large’ and ‘extra-fine’ means ‘even finer than fine’, why doesn’t extraordinary mean ‘even more ordinary than ordinary’?
The announcement was made by a nameless official. This really means ‘The announcement was made by an unnamed official’!
Preplan, preboard, preheat and prerecord. These words simply mean planning, boarding, heating and recording. The prefixes are wholly superfluous!
Pull up a chair. We don’t really pull up a chair; we pull it along the ground. We don’t pick up the phone; we pick up the receiver. And when we vomit, we do not throw up; we throw out!
Put your best foot forward. We have a good foot and a better foot, but do we really have a third and best foot? It’s our better foot that we put forward. This peculiarity is akin to ‘May the best team win’!
English is an inexplicably weird language that sometimes defies all logic! It is only in English that beck appears only with call, cranny with nook, hue with cry, main with might, fettle with fine, aback with taken, caboodle with kit, and spick and span only with each other.
Why can’t eyes and jars be ajar, as well as doors? Why is it that we can make amends but never just one amend and that no matter how much we traverse the annals of history we can never discover just one annal?
Why is it that we can never pull a shenanigan, be in a doldrum or get just one jitter? Why are all shrifts short, all lucre filthy, all bedfellows strange and all bystanders innocent? Why is it that only swoops are fell?
Why do six, seven, eight and nine change to sixty, seventy, eighty, and ninety, but two, three, four and five do not become ‘twoty’, ‘threety’, ‘fourty’, and ‘fivety’?
Why is a first-degree murder more serious than a third-degree murder but a third-degree burn is more serious than a first-degree burn? Why do we vent our spleens but never our livers or kidneys? Why are only our minds boggled and never our eyes or our hearts?
Why is it that when we probe the wreckage of an air crash we can never find just one smithereen? Have we ever encountered someone who was combobulated, shevelled, gruntled, chalant, plussed, ruly, gainly, maculate, pecunious or peccable?
Have we ever come across a ‘sung’ hero? Where are the people who would hurt a fly, who are great shakes, who can cut the mustard, who are our cups of tea, who would lift a finger to help, who would give you the time of day, who have been in a soup and whom we could touch with a barge pole?
Why is brassiere singular but panties plural? How is it that we can open up the floor, climb the walls, raise the roof, pick up the house, and bring down the house? Why does the sun come up and go down, but prices go up and come down? Why do our houses burn up and burn down and our cars slow up and slow down?
While we can ‘allude’ to a particular incident to make a point, we cannot ‘illude’ to it. On the other hand, we can be momentarily deceived by an ‘illusion’ but an ‘allusion’ can confuse us but can never deceive or trick us.
An elusive elf is one we can’t catch, but an illusive one was never really there at all. It was just an illusion! The Board of Education can get bored of education itself.
A bandage can be wound around the wound. A farm can be used to produce produce. A dump can be so full that it can refuse more refuse. A soldier can desert his dessert in the desert.
As there is no time like the present, it may be the right time to present the present. There can be a row among the oarsmen about how to row. There can be an invalid insurance for an invalid person.
We can detect the tear in a painting and shed a tear. We can utter something about the utter futility of an action. And we can intimate something personal to an intimate friend.
The conclusion is inescapable. Learning English is inexorably easy but mastering the immensely vexatious language is as difficult as climbing a wall which is leaning toward us or kissing a girl who is leaning away from us!
Here, two helplessly uproarious quotes of the well known American lawyer, writer and columnist Dough Larson on the sheer senselessness of English readily come to our aid: ‘If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur’; and ‘If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.’