Re: English is a crazy language

On 22 Apr 02, at 20:05, The Gray Wizard wrote:

> Let's face it - English is a crazy language...
Though sometimes it helps to know some history.

> neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
But there is a pinecone-like shape. (Didn't we just have this one a
while ago?)

> Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.
Sweetmeats are also "meat", only in an older sense of the word (=
"food"). Like "deer", which got specialised from "animal" to its
current meaning.

> We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find
> that quicksand can work slowly,
Again, using the wrong meaning of "quick" -- the correct one IMO
("alive") is one that is rather rare nowadays outside of fixed phrases
such as "quicksand" and "the quick and the dead".

> If one mouse, 2 mice, then why not one house, 2 hice?
It is "2 hice" in my family ;) (At least jocularly.)

> One index, 2 indices?
It's not English's fault what foreign languages do to their nouns;
English speakers could only be faulted, if at all, for retaining the
inflection rather than naturalising it.

> And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise
> man and a wise guy are such opposites?
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=irony

> And my favorite of all.... Why to we park in the driveway and drive on
> the parkway???
Not true in my idiolect at all :)

Some of it was funny, but some of it seemed rather simplistic to me.

Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <Philip.Newton@...>

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