You got words that combine to contradict each
other. You got words that sound the same but would be awkward as hell if they ran
into each other in the same sentence.
What started
me thinking about it was the question some wiseacre posed after seeing my blog:
If a one-talent specialist knows many things within his specialty, does that
make him a renaissance hedgehog?
Oxymoron! I didn’t say it out loud, of
course, but that’s what we had: a couple of words joined together but forever at
odds with each other,
like in some marriages.
The other
thing -- homonyms – I associate with my mother. In her later years, after my father
died, she kept a notebook of English-language homonyms. I think it may have
been her own immigrant background – Ellis Island ,
’04 – that motivated her to compile something to help newcomers to the
language. [That was 1904.]
She had a
highschool education and she did a lot with it. (Taught me to read, for one
thing.) The collection started small – to, too,
and two; hall vs haul – that sort of thing. By the time she died, just short of 102,
she had branched out into words that confused in print (like carousel and carousal), and “New York homonyms” -- words that shouldn’t have
sounded alike but did, where we lived (I give you farther and father, sorted and sordid, sauce and source…). That made me wonder, had we
lived one borough over, what she might have done with the distinctive Brooklyn accent. Sometimes she would just note
oddities: how “impugn” had nothing to do with “impunity.”
Sometimes the words would be obscure (by my lights, anyway: try “pome” ) or archaic
(when last did you hear anyone “keen”?).
That started
me thinking about language as I’ve encountered it, and what English must be
for people who have to learn it.
I struggled with a foreign language requirement
in college. I’d studied Latin in highschool and would have enjoyed going on
with it. I thought of a way to do it, too, but I couldn’t shake a mental
picture of the Admissions Department at Gonzaga puzzling over my name on the application.
It wasn’t taught at the school I attended, and I had to switch to a modern
language. I chose Spanish, and almost failed it -- in part, I’m sure, because
of resentment at having to start over. It doesn’t seem now like that hard a language
to work with.
A few years
later I found myself immersed in Japanese, and started to study that. It was
going well, but the government agency I was working with required my services
at an artillery piece, and I had to drop out.
But in my short acquaintance with it, the language seemed learnable.
But then there’s English. The quirks! Help, helped; walk, walked; take, took?
Bring, brought? C’mon.
C’mon?
How does anyone learn this language?
Next: Some free association
