We sometimes make fun, including myself, of other people's English. How we put down and ridicule mispronunciations, misspellings, and grammatical errors. It led one expat to compare it to "a monkey laughing at another monkey's ugliness." Ouch, that really hurt. But we put this on ourselves, this colonial mentality. We regard fluency in English as a mark of one's breeding, education or intelligence, economic status -- and one's ineptitude as a sign of lack thereof. Ironically, in America, they tolerate and sometimes embrace English as it is expressed with a rich variety of accents and localized lingos or slangs across the states.
Who can ever master English when the language itself continues to evolve owing to the dynamism of the times? Modern technology and pop culture are two moving forces that influence conversational English. Ten years ago we never heard of faxes, beepers, CDs, cellular phones, videokes and rollerblades. Environmentalism introduced words like lahar, El Nino, aquifer, and ozone into our everyday vocabulary. The corporate world gave us mergers, IPOs, MBAs, downsizing and globali-zation. But it is the world of information technology which subject us to a barrage of confusing techno-babble. Small wonder that the "Field Guide to Windows '95" by Stephen L. Nelson put itself to task to distinguish curser from cursor. According to the book, the latter is "someone who curses, who frequently shares his or her vocabulary of obscenities." Humorist Dave Barry simplifies megahertz by defining it as "really, really big hertz."
Richard Lederer wrote a series of articles why he thinks "English is a Crazy Language" and has devoted a website aptly called Verbivore: What follows is a condensed and unattributed version of this four-part series which I initially got by e-mail. You can read the full articles and others in Verbivore.
"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 or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.
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? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices?
Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend, that you comb through annals of history but not a single annal? 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? If you wrote a letter, perhaps you bote your tongue?
Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. 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? Park on driveways and drive on parkways?
How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and wise guy are opposites? How can overlook and oversee be opposites, while quite a lot and quite a few are alike? How can the weather be hot as hell one day and cold as hell another.
Have you noticed that we talk about certain things only when they are absent? Have you ever seen a horseful carriage (as compared to a horse-less one) or a strapful gown (as opposed to a strapless)? Met a sung hero ("unsung") or experienced requited ("unrequited) love? Have you ever run into someone who was combobulated, gruntled, ruly or peccable? And where are all those people who ARE spring chickens or who would ACTUALLY hurt a fly?
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 clock goes off by going on.
English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race (which, of course, isn't a race at all). That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible. And why, when I wind up my watch, I start it, but when I wind up this essay, I end it."