Complex Numbers

The King's English

Well, I've signed up for "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  [13+] again, for November, since I'm not doing NaNo this year. Once again, I figure if I'm going to try to write something in here every day, might as well mix it up with some prompts I wouldn't consider on my own.

Meanwhile, I still have a ton of blog fodder to get through. Here's today's:

https://cheezburger.com/9184517/the-english-language-being-infuriatingly-confusi...

The English Language Being Infuriatingly Confusing (39 Images)

By "images" it means "screenshots of tweets." I despise Twitter with the fiery passion of 10,000 suns, but sites like this (as clickbaity as it is) can sometimes present the best of the worst.

Since they're screenshots, copy/paste isn't an option, so I'll just pick a few amusing ones to highlight.

#8 It blows my mind that english has no plural for "you."

Ah, but it does, at least here in the South. "Y'all" is a perfectly good second person plural. It sounds more polite than "youse guys" (NY/NJ) or "yinz" (specific to the Pittsburgh area).

Incidentally, it's always "y'all" and never (as I've seen it) "Ya'll." An apostrophe stands in for missing letters, and the missing letters in this case go between the y and the a, not the a and the l.

And yet, even if you avoid regional dialect and think only of Standard English, the plural "you" still makes more sense than the French "vous," which can be either a second person plural, or a formal second person singular. How do you know when you can drop the formal "vous" and use the familiar "tu?" I guess I'll have to spend some time in France to figure this out. Awww.

#9 Defenestration

Still one of my favorite words.

#11 Why does my nose run but my feet smell?

You might wanna see a doctor. Or three.

#22 I before E except when you run a feisty heist on a weird foreign neighbour.

Yeah, okay, that one's an example of why English is frickin' weird.

#26 The fact that Kansas and Arkansas are pronounced differently bothers me way more than it should.

This might have been my introduction to the fuckeduppedness of the English language. To this day, I pronounce Arkansas "ar-Kansas" just to be funny. I also pronounce Missouri "misery" because it's Missouri.

#33 Why is a "w" called a "double-U" when it is clearly a "double-V"?

Not in cursive. Also, because in Latin, from which we derive our alphabet, V is U. Confused yet?

Anyway, those are just the short ones. The longer ones are worth reading, too. I'm now even more convinced that English has been dominating the world stage not because of British colonialism or because it's versatile, but because once you learn English you feel a sense of pride unmatched by learning any other language (except, perhaps, Mandarin, though I wouldn't know). Once you've learned to navigate its dark corners, there's no going back.