There’s
English, and then there’s English.
No, I am not referring to British English vs. American English, nor am I referring to different American regional dialects, though someone from Alabama conversing with a New Yorker could have a difficult time. No, I’m just talking about the American English language and the many challenges posed to using it properly.
No, I am not referring to British English vs. American English, nor am I referring to different American regional dialects, though someone from Alabama conversing with a New Yorker could have a difficult time. No, I’m just talking about the American English language and the many challenges posed to using it properly.
It’s under threat by all kinds of things
and entities including:
·
Ebonics
·
Spanglish
·
Emojis
·
Slang
·
Dumbed-down
education system
·
Poorly
edited Internet communications
·
Social
media’s introduction of new terms and phrases
America is a melting pot of ethnicities, nationalities, religions, gender
identities, sexual preferences, and economic classes, and the language of the
nation also reflects a melting pot of ideas and influences. As the world is undergoing change, even under
its fast-paced siege, language must revolve with it, to reflect these many
revisions, expansions, and alterations to how we communicate with each other.
What
are we to use to guide us through the maze?
Luckily, there are many books about books and the nuances, quirks, and laws of the language. One excellent handbook is The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need: One-Step Source for Every Writing Assignment by Susan Thurman.
Luckily, there are many books about books and the nuances, quirks, and laws of the language. One excellent handbook is The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need: One-Step Source for Every Writing Assignment by Susan Thurman.
It covers things like:
·
Punctuation
and style
·
Parts
of speech such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, etc.
·
Irregular
verbs, verb tenses, indefinite pronouns
·
Basic
sentence structure such as subjects and predicates, phrases, clauses, etc.
·
How
to write better sentences
·
Avoiding
common errors in word choice, spelling, misuse of clichés, eliminating
repetition, dumping double negatives, etc.
·
How
to write for a variety of formats from the five-paragraph essay and the
abstract to a research paper and critical analysis.
It
wisely notes on page 2 that: “Every rule will have an exception (and probably
more than one).”
The
book listed 1001 most frequently misspelled words – including the word
“misspelled “-- from abdicate to zucchini.
There’s
so much to get right when using English.
There’s grammar and punctuation, spelling, proper word selection, run-on
sentences, capitalization, tense usage, and writing logically and with
impact. The book noted people commonly
confused words, such as:
·
Adapt,
adopt
·
Accept,
except
·
Aid,
aide
·
Complement,
compliment
·
Good,
well
·
Foreword,
forward
·
Use
to, used to
·
Whose,
who’s
·
Your,
you’re
The
language has so many little things that could pose minefields to young readers. Contractions, compound words, and homonyms
can challenge some. So can colloquialisms, sentence fragments, non sequiturs, and dangling modifiers. Just a comma, hyphen, or parenthesis in the
right place can make all the difference between understanding,
misunderstanding, and not understanding the intent of a statement. Don’t forget tense consistency, your
gerunds, past participles, and split infinitives. All of this might make you want to brush up
on conjunctions and subordinate clauses!
As
helpful as books like the Only Grammar
Book You’ll Ever Need or Shrunk &
White’s Elements of Style, a fun book to own is Tyrannosaurus Lex: The Marvelous Book of Palindromes, Anagrams and Other Delightful and Outrageous Word Play
by Rod L. Evans, Ph.D.
It’s
a book of verbal wit. Evans goes beyond
the traditional definition of wordplay, which involves the manipulating of or
calling attention to letters, sounds, and meanings. He doesn’t just dazzle us with anagrams
(rearrange the letters of Albert Einstein and you get ten elite brains) or
palindromes (where sentences read the same forward and backward, i.e. Do geese
see God/or Dennis and Edna sinned).
Evans
suggests we read other books on word play, including Anguished English by Richard Lederer, which features real-life
linguistic bloopers. He also suggests
consulting the hundreds of forms of wordplay in Dave Maurice’s work, The Dictionary of Wordplay.
He
says the person who deserves credit for helping us put wordplay on a scientific
footing is Dimitri Bergmann, who penned Language
on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical
Oddities in 1965. He said it was “An
excellent work on palindromes, anagrams, and many other forms of visual word
play involving recognizing and manipulating patterns of letters, it presented
wordplay in a scientific light, as a discipline with its own logic, concepts,
and vocabulary. Bergmann’s
groundbreaking book earned him the title “Father of Logology,” popularizing a
term for recreational logistics.”
His
collection of word play and linguistic wit overwhelmed me the first time I took
a stab at it. I was taken aback by how
thorough, well-presented, and humorous his critique on English was. It is packaged so
well.
Here’s
a small example of the things he collected:
literordinyms
Words
with three or more letters written in consecutive alphabetical order.
i.e.DEFine
or HIJack or STUpid
contronyms
Words
that have opposite meanings when they have multiple meanings.
i.e.
bolt
To
secure – I bolted the door before I went to sleep
To
depart – the boy bolted out of the room.
heteronyms
Words
with identical spellings but different meanings and pronunciations.
i.e.
– close means near and also to shut
when
you’re close to the door, please close it.
i.e. – minute means 60 seconds and tiny.
I
had only a minute to going to minute detail.
kangaroo words
Larger
words carrying smaller synonyms.
Kangaroo
words contain smaller words related in meaning to the larger parent word. The smaller word is spelled with successive
but not completely consecutive letters.
pleonasms
redundancy,
such as:
absolutely
essential
advanced
warning
empty
hole
tiny
speck
revert
back
eudonyms
Where
a person’s name represents their strongest attribute
Russell
Brain, neurologist
Chip
Beck, pro golfer
Marc
Rich, billionaire
Bob
Rock, rock music producer
John
Wisdom, British philosopher
He
had this wonderful list of words where a letter is heard, but not seen, such
as:
Beau=o
Cue=q
Passed=t
Gypsy= j
Seal=c
Colonel=r
Then
he showed how every letter can appear in at least one word where that letter is
silent, such as:
a=bread
b=debt
e=tape
h=ghost
i=thief
s=aisle
z=rendezvous
It
would take me hours to convey the beautiful linguistic conundrums that he
presents the reader. He codifies many of the linguistic oddities that make English the best language ever created. But I will conclude
with an excerpt from his introduction:
“Word
play is a natural part of a language and is associated with riddles, puzzles,
games, puns; jokes, double entendres, and even linguistic confusion (as in
malapropisms). It involves viewing or
treating language as an art form, as a source of entertainment. We can find it almost everywhere, including
homes schools, offices, businesses, and even public restrooms (graffiti). The advertisement and bumper sticker “I ♥NY”
is based on a rebus, a message involving words and pictures. A radiator repair business whose slogan is
“Best place in town to take a leak” is also using wordplay – the pun."
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