English Weirdness Part One: Words

So for my first proper post, now that I’ve introduced myself and we’ve gotten to know each other a little bit, I figured it would be a good idea to address the elephant in the room. Let’s talk about the English Language. 

You’re all thinking it. I’m just saying it.

English is awful. 

I love it (don’t get me wrong, I really do), but it’s awful.

There. I said it. I put it out there. And now you can feel better, since you’re not the only one who thinks it. Also, because you’re right. English is an awful language to learn, a weird language to study, and a difficult language to navigate, even for native speakers. 

I used to tell my students that English was the language that followed other languages down dark alleys to mug them for spare grammar. Which is a hilarious image that made even jaded college freshmen chuckle. 

(I’m pretty sure I stole that joke from an amazing book about grammar called Eats, Shoots, And Leaves. And yes, I am the kind of nerd who reads grammar books for fun, but that one crossed over to non-nerds too. It’s the kind of funny where you laugh out loud and attract awkward attention. I speak from experience 😂.)

Basically, what I’m saying is that English, especially for non-native speakers, is hard to master in no small part because it hardly ever follows logical rules. Or there’s a rule, but it has about a million exceptions. Or most of the time things function in one way, but once in a while some weird leftover grammar from Latin or Greek lingers to confuse everyone. 

Gotta love leftovers. 

I could go on for hours about how weird and quirky English is, but I don’t think anyone has time for that. Not all at once anyway. 😂 So I’m breaking it into parts! Bear with me. I promise it’ll be helpful. Today’s topic?

Word Weirdness.

I know, I know. Grammar is boring, Frances. I did enough of that stuff in school and I don’t want to do anymore. I hear you. I totally get it, but! 

The more you understand how a thing works, the better you get at making it work the way you want. I won’t make you do any exercises or sentence diagraming. What I will do is show you some quirky word things that happen in English. Things that might help you avoid confusion or miscommunication in future. 

Things that might help you connect with your audience the next time you’re creating content or preparing a job application. Or even shooting off a quick email to a friend or coworker. 

Think of it this way: If I can show you where the potholes are, you can avoid driving into one and popping a tire. Metaphorically. 

Hey, I’m from New England. Potholes are a way of life up here. So, let’s explore some of those potholes. 

Loanwords

Setting aside the fact that English is a mishmash of a dozen source languages, it really does steal things from other languages. English heavily uses loanwords, which are words that we just stole from another language without adapting them. 

Some of them are obvious like sushi or cafe. Some of them are so ubiquitous now that they hardly seem like loans anymore, like kindergarten or zombie 🧟. 

Loanwords function like a linguistic copy-and-paste. We just sort of took some other languages word and used it for the same thing.

Quirky, but not totally out of the ordinary. Other languages do this too. 

Leftovers

Then there are those pesky leftovers, like the word ‘whom.’ A word that people use to sound smarter. Only problem is that 9 times out of 10, they use it incorrectly.

Whom is only properly used on the object of a preposition. For example: To whom are you speaking? For whom did you buy that gift?

It’s a leftover of the widespread use of declensions in English. A declension is changing of the form of a noun to give extra information. So if a noun is the subject of the sentence, it looks one way, but if it’s used to show possession it looks different. Think she/her/hers or he/him/his. Same word and same meaning, but the different forms show different function. 

So Whom is a leftover form of ‘Who’. Whose is another declension of Who. The rest seem to have faded away.

Latin has six different forms (called cases) in each declension. There are five declensions total, different nouns have different declensions. It’s a bit more complicated than English, but also more formulaic. You know by the ending what a word is doing in a sentence. 

As an aside, ‘whomst’ isn’t a real word. It’s hilarious, but it doesn’t actually mean anything. 

Homonyms

Then there are words that need context clues. I’m talking about words that are spelled the same, but have different meaning based on pronunciation. 

Like desert meaning to abandon or desert meaning an arid region. Then there’s read in the present tense or read in the past tense. Then there’s also lead meaning to guide forward or lead meaning a metal that used to be in paint. It’s the wild west of words out there.

That’s to say nothing about words that change both meaning and pronunciation based on whether or not they’re capitalized, like Polish the nationality and polish the cleaning process. 

Come to think of it, a lot of those seem to be place-related words. Turkey the country versus turkey the bird. Mobile the city in Alabama USA versus mobile the cellphone. — Huh. That’s cool. I never noticed that before…🙂

But wait! There’s also those words that have multiple meanings, sometimes even contradictory ones. Those are called contronyms. 

Words like bolt meaning to flee abruptly or to hold together. Or dust meaning to clean away fine powder or to sprinkle a fine powder onto something (like dusting with icing sugar or dusting for fingerprints) or the word for the fine powder itself. That one’s particularly bizarre. 

Like I said, English is a wild ride. 

Dialect

And none of this takes into account the differences between written and spoken English, which hardly any talks about, and the range of dialects that all have their own quirks. 

When I was in school, I took 6 years of Spanish (pero no hablo espanol 😜). We discussed the vocab and accent differences that exist among Spanish spoken in different regions. Makes sense, right? Since Spanish in Colombia, where my teacher was from, is different from Spanish spoken in Spain or Mexico or Chile. 

I have NEVER been in a classroom where there was even a mention of the differences between English spoken in Appalachia and English spoken in Boston, never mind Yorkshire or Sydney or Johannesburg. They all sounds different to the ear, obviously, but they also behave differently too.

If you said, “go rid up your room” to someone in Boston, they’d look at you like you were mental and probably walk away. Say it to someone in western Pennsylvania and they’d know exactly what you mean. 

If you told someone in Ontario to put something “on the fridge,” they’d confusedly place it on top of your refrigerator and maybe ask if you were feeling okay. 

Believe me. 

I literally had this happen to me. I was living in London, Ontario at the time. I laughed so hard, I cried when I figured out what was happening. Which didn’t help my case, considering my friend was already thinking I was delusional. 

Where I come from in southern New England, putting things “on the fridge” means to put them inside it rather than on top of it. 

So that’s a thing. There are dozens of dialects of English that have at least some mutually exclusive vocabulary, slang, colloquialisms, and other assorted strangeness. In addition to the standard English Weirdness relating to words, spellings, and word meanings. 

It’s a quirky and weird and wonderful and awful language to be bobbing around in, but understanding some of those little grammar snags can help you avoid them. It can also help you create better content, write better job applications, and communicate with more clarity and concision. 

The more you understand how it works, the better you’ll get at making it work for you. So stay tuned. There will be more English Weirdness to come.

* An extra point to anyone who can spot the Pirates of the Caribbean references in this post

Disclosure: Any links in this post may be affiliate links. That means, if you click them and buy the recommended product, I make a small commission. It also means that you’re contributing to my vacation fund. Thank you in advance!

And as always…My inbox is always open for suggestions about future topics.