English is a crazy language – funny!

English is a crazy language

We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice

If the plural of man is always called men
Why shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth
Why shouldn’t the plural of booth be called beeth?       

Then one may be that, and there would be those
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose
We speak of a brother and also of brethren
But though we say mother, we never say methren
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him
But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim

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

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?

Doesn’t it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend?
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?

Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English

Should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane
In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital?

We ship by truck but send cargo by ship
We have noses that run and feet that smell
We park in a driveway and drive in a parkway
And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same
While a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

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 goes off by going on

And in closing……….


If Father is Pop, shouldn’t Mother be Mop?

 

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Comments

  • Dmitri Allicock  On 04/02/2013 at 11:21 am

    English is a funny language; that explains why we park our car on the driveway and drive our car on the parkway.
    The word ‘good’ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

  • Karran Raghubir  On 04/02/2013 at 6:30 pm

    Dear Leno

    Read and reread your email. English is indeed a crazy language. Yes, I got a chuckle out of it last night. In fact yours was the third copy I received. Though it is crazy it makes sense. Still it is funny and entertaining. I bet it took a lot of patience and research to come up with so much. But more than anything it is very funny and will make a lot of us laugh whenever they read it.

    Love

    Shanti

    Sent from my iPad

  • Hubert Hintzen  On 04/04/2013 at 5:09 am

    @Karran Raghubir, you stated that you read and reread your e-mail, but did you actually read it. We in the USA would say “crack the window” and immediately after crack the eggs.

  • Cyril Balkaran  On 04/05/2013 at 9:42 am

    We who speak the English everywhere are the inverters of this Incomplete but Crazy language. Its our means and our verbal way of insane communication. What would be our life without this insane communication. Something else to think crazily about. Let’s hope no one ends up in the madhouse of Verbal Insanity! Ha HA. Keep the crazy Communication going, but where to our Majesty’s crazy Zone?

  • Damian O'Brien  On 07/24/2013 at 8:23 am

    Hi. English isn’t really a crazy language. There are reasons for most of the apparent irregularities. I’ve written a book called If Houses Why Not Mouses? You can check it out on amazon. Best wishes, Damian O’Brien

  • excellent

  • people101blog  On 07/21/2017 at 6:34 am

    Reblogged this on people101blog.

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