English Is a Funny Language

Has it ever occurred to you that pixellated isn’t the same as pixilated? Or that hippie isn’t the same as hippy? Well, at least it didn’t used to be.

3 comments… add one
  • sam Link

    Why English drives foreign learners of English crazy:

    I take it you already know
    Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
    Others may stumble, but not you,
    On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
    Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
    To learn of less familiar traps?
    Beware of heard, a dreadful word
    That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
    And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead –
    For goodness sake don’t call it deed!
    Watch out for meat and great and threat
    (They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
    A moth is not a moth in mother,
    Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
    And here is not a match for there
    Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
    And then there’s dose and rose and lose –
    Just look them up – and goose and choose,
    And cork and work and card and ward,
    And font and front and word and sword,
    And do and go and thwart and cart –
    Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start!
    A dreadful language? Man alive!
    I’d mastered it when I was five!

  • michael reynolds Link

    Way OT but I want to get it on the record. My dark horse pick for Trump’s veep is Ben Carson.

  • It would be shrewd, that’s for sure.

Leave a Comment