I got this via email today and thought it was pretty funny.

You think English is easy ?


1) The bandage was wound around the wound.

2) The farm was used to produce produce.

3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.

4) We must polish the Polish furniture.

5) He could lead if he would get the lead out.

6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.

7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.

8) A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.

9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.

10) I did not object to the object.

11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.

12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.

13) They were too close to the door to close it.

14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.

15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.

16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.

17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail.

18) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.

19) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.

20) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?

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 nor French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat. 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? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth, beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? 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 English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell?

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.

English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible.

PS. - Why doesn't 'Buick' rhyme with 'quick'


You lovers of the English language might enjoy this .

There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that is 'UP'

It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP ? At a meeting, why does a topic come UP ? Why do we speak UP and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report ?

We call UP our friends. And we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car . At other times the little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses. To be dressed is one thing, but to be dressed UP is special.

And this UP is confusing: A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night.

We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP ! To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP , look the word UP in the dictionary.. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4th of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions.. I f you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP , you may wind UP with a hundred or more. When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP

When it rains, it wets the earth and often messes things UP

When it doesn't rain for awhile, things dry UP

One could go on and on, but I'll wrap it UP, for now my time is UP, so........... it is time to shut UP !

Some varieties looked like eggs and therefore they called it an eggplant.


Named after a dish from Hamburg.


Its how they're prepared. It doesn't mean they're actually French.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

James, while John had had "had," had had "had had"; "had had" had had a better effect on the teacher.

The horse raced past the barn fell.

The old man the boat.

The man who whistles tunes pianos.

The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi.

In fact, there are no such things as "French fries", only "french fries". They would have originally been "frenched fries", where "to french" means "to cut into long strips".

Heck, in French, they're called "pommes frites", which means "fried apple". Yes, I know the derivation of that, but it's no less absurd on the surface.

Oh, that's a good one, which I hadn't seen before. And unlike most such non-forward-parsable sentences, it can't be fixed with commas, hyphens, "which", or "that". Fortunately, unlike the others, it relies on two ambiguous words (common-adjective/rare-noun and common-noun/rare-verb) and so that case probably doesn't very often crop up accidentally.

Peter

I'll add a couple of my favorites-

Why do they call them 'apartments' when they're all together?
Why do we drive on parkways and park on driveways?

lol- good list!

I remember reading somewhere something along the lines of the following:

"English doesn't merely borrow from other languages, it follows them down dark alleys, knocks them unconscious, and then empties their pockets."

It does have one of the largest vocabularies of any language (I've seen figures from around 500000 words to more than 800000), mainly because of this propensity.

Also, always remember - Verbing wierds language!

pca

The OED claims to document "over half a million words, both present and past". And since the OED is a record of word usage, not prescriptive or orthographic, I can't imagine there being a larger compilation anywhere.