Life is good. It’s a bank holiday weekend and Susie Dent has provided the definitive list of the ten best curiosities in the English language.
1. Time for some chat-chit
When it comes to rules, English has very few. Thanks to the large number of influences that have come to bear on our language, from invasions by Germanic tribes or the Vikings, to the effects of the Norman Conquest and the dominance of US music, our language is a glorious mish-mash of different conventions. But there are a few linguistic laws that we don’t know we know, the instinctive knowledge of which is simply native speaker’s luck.
Take ‘ablaut reduplication’, an unfriendly title for a fascinating phenomenon in language. Essentially this is an ancient protocol that means that bells never go dong-ding, nor will we ever dally-dilly or shally-silly on our way to a song-sing or game of pong-ping while wearing flop-flips (nor, sadly, have a chat-chit while eating a Kat-Kit). The ‘rule’ dictates that, in any duplicating word combination, we always put the i sound (as in ‘pit’), or the e (as in ‘see’), first, before an a or o. Even with three elements, this unspoken law stands: never bash-bosh-bish, or eeny-miney-meeny-moe.
2. An old plain truth
Another such ‘rule’ is the one governing English adjectives, unknown to most of us until the writer Mark Forsyth pointed out a hidden blueprint when it comes to ordering our descriptions. The sequence we must follow is ‘opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose.’ Thus you will never have a ‘green great dragon’, or a ‘young small girl admiring her red shiny new shoes in the marble long old mirror’. Exceptions to this order are rare, though among them is the ‘big bad wolf’, which happens to observe…. the rule of ablaut reduplication.
3. In search of caffeine
At this point I probably should mention the one rule we were all taught at school and still cling on to when it comes to spelling words like ‘receive’, ‘sieve’, or ‘piece’: it is always ‘i before e, except after c’, right? Wrong. There are in fact almost a thousand words that break the rule. And rather brilliantly, the editors of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary have put together the jingle we should be using in school instead:
I before e, except after c
Or when sounded as ‘a’ as in ‘neighbour’ and ‘weigh’
Unless the ‘c’ is part of a ‘sh’ sound as in ‘glacier’
Or it appears in comparatives and superlatives like ‘fancier’
And also except when the vowels are sounded as ‘e’ as in ‘seize’
Or ‘i’ as in ‘height’
Or also in ‘-ing’ inflections ending in ‘-e’ as in ‘cueing’
Or in compound words as in ‘albeit’
Or occasionally in technical words with strong etymological links to their parent languages as in ‘cuneiform’
Or in other numerous and random exceptions such as ‘science’, ‘forfeit’, and ‘weird’.
That’s that then.
4. A Q about queue
When it comes to words that are curiosities in themselves, we must surely start with the word ‘queue’, the pronunciation of which needs only its first letter – the others are just queueing up behind. The word is based on French, where it means the tail of an animal, which is what a line of people resembles. Incidentally, there is only one common word in English that has five vowels in a row: queueing.
5. Mean misnomers
It is a source of vexation to many that the word ‘palindrome’ is not a palindrome, in the same way as ‘lisp’ is impossible to pronounce for those with a ‘lisp’, ‘rhotacism’ a nightmare for those who can’t say their ‘r’s, and the word ‘abbreviation’ is too long.
6. onomato-?
I am often asked for a term for words that look like the thing they describe: ‘bed’, for example, and ‘bench’ (oh, and ‘queue’). To my knowledge there isn’t one yet, even though it’s such a pleasing phenomenon.
Read More: Susie Dent’s Top Tens: 10 ‘Americanisms’ that aren’t actually American
7. Wouldn’t you rather be k-nitting?
Silent letters abound in English, for many different reasons. You might wonder for example why there is a silent ‘k’ in such words as ‘knight’, ‘knife’, and ‘knitting’? In fact, we did once pronounce the hard ‘k’, just as Germans do when speaking such words as ‘Knecht’ (a boy, and the ancestor of ‘knight’). Which means we might once have described a k-night sitting on a k-nee doing some k-nitting. Sadly, we seem to have found the pronunciation altogether too difficult, and eventually dropped the hard ‘k’s whilst preserving (of course) the spelling.
8. Some nouns have corresponding verbs, and others, well, don’t.
Most nouns in English have a verb right alongside them – we can ‘toe the line’, ‘elbow’ our way over it, or decide to ‘impact’ the situation another way. Verbing has long been a controversial subject – Shakespeare loved it, even making a verb out of ‘friend’ long before Facebook, but his critics didn’t much like it at the time either. Today, any mention of ‘medalling’ (or, worse, ‘podiuming’) in a contest will be met with dripping disdain. Such debates aside, there are some nouns that have never produced verbs (yet). We can no more ‘language’ something than, despite Internet memes, ‘librarian’ or ‘science the shit’ out of it (hat-tip Matt Damon).
9. The past tense of ‘go’ was never ‘goed’
It is a mystery of language that the verb to ‘go’ never really had a past tense in the form of ‘goed’. Instead, speakers looked to a synonym that existed at the same time, ‘wend’ (as in to ‘wend one’s way’), and decided to borrow its past tense instead in the form of ‘went’. The same is true of ‘good’ and ‘better/best’ instead of ‘gooder/goodest’. No one has ever quite worked out why.
10. We don’t like ‘strong verbs’ any more.
Once upon a time, English speakers liked to have fun with verbs, mixing things up so that the past tense of ‘buy’ became ‘bought’, ‘catch’ became ‘caught’, and ‘glided’, at least for a while, became ‘glode’. These days we decide to opt for the ‘weaker’ ending by sticking an ‘-ed ‘onto our verbs to form the past tense. Thus we say ‘I texted him yesterday’ instead of ‘I toxt him’, and ‘I chided myself’ rather than (Urban Dictionary aside) ‘chode’. Somehow the older versions seem so much more poetic.
