Anglophilia Rides Again

I'll be upfront about this; I like the English language. It's bizarre, hard to learn (for native speakers of other languages) and it's constantly changing. Now, I'll discuss some of my favorite things about it! Full disclosure: I am an engineer who also loves to read and is married to a mathematician who is also somewhat of a grammar queen. Thus I have come to appreciate how intricate our language is and how many other people (I'm looking at you, engineers) don't really know how to use it properly.

First, the size of the English language is astounding. Do you have any idea how many words you know? Me neither, but I bet it's a lot! Even people that weren't forced to take vocabulary in high school and will never, ever be able to forget those words know more than 10,000 words (total and completely bogus guess, but I bet the order of magnitude is about right). Those of us that read a lot, and are relatively good writers (do not judge this claim based on your reading of this blog. I think it sucks too.) probably have a vocabulary approaching 100,000 words. That just boggles my mind, literally sometimes as I try to recall a certain word that I know I know. Of course, in most cases, a large portion of those 100,000 words are technical-type words that will never be used in general conversation (i.e porosity, capacitance, enthalpy, etc.), but who cares! It's still a lot of words!

Second, written English can be hilarious. Most people communicate primarily by speaking and listening, which means homophones are almost impossible to distinguish in terms of spelling. The meaning is, of course, obvious by the context. The comedy comes in when people are forced to write and want to use words they have only heard. This leads to sentences like the following:

• Shortly after he woke this morning, Trevor decided to dawn his favorite Eagles jersey.
• The suburbs are full of track housing.
  
• While she was totally hammered, Matilda tried to walk threw a plate glass window.

See how funny those are? No? Well, maybe I'm just a dork. I also find it funny when my fingers are on the wrong keys when I start typing and end up with a bunch of mpmdrmdr words. My favorite pair of homophones, though, are raze and raise; the only two, to my knowledge, that are homophones AND antonyms! Too bad "raze" is hardly ever used. I guess there is also the "sanction" "sanction" pair, but that's different. I even get confused by that one. I mean they're spelled the same but have opposite meanings? WTF?

Third, it really gets on my nerves when people don't understand the meaning of words but use them anyway. Case number one: irony. Irony is a great concept, both poignant and painful. It can cause minor irritation or devastating disappointment. However, it is an entirely different concept from suckiness. I blame Alanis Morissette for this horrible bastardization of the word. Let's look at her song Ironic and see what we find! All of the following are called "ironic."

Rain on your wedding day.
Not ironic, it just sucks.

10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife.
Not ironic. What would be ironic is if you had 10,000 knives yesterday, but you needed a spoon.

A free ride, when you already paid.
How could it be a free ride if you paid? Not only is this not ironic, it doesn't even make sense!

A death row pardon, two minutes too late.
Okay, that is ironic.

Those are just a few examples from the song, which horribly mixes the ironic with the non-ironic. Here are the complete lyrics for you in case you were living in a cave 10 years ago. Finally, let me point out that there is a difference between sarcastic and ironic. Not everything that is ironic is also sarcastic. All you twenty-somethings that use these synonymously, please, please stop before MY HEAD ASPLODES! They are similar, yes, but the connotations are very different. Sarcastic has more in common with sardonic than it does ironic. Why not use sardonic more? That's a good word!

As a final note, please feel free to disagree with me completely. That's another beauty of the English language; it is constantly and rapidly changing, so who knows what tomorrow might bring. There are, however, those among us that insist on following "rules" that were originally put in place to differentiate the educated rich from the uneducated poor. When you insist on using these rules, you are helping the MAN! Come one, stick it to the man! Use "poor" grammar! Say "Where are you at?" Say "Who'd have thunk?" On the other hand, don't make yourself look like an idiot at work when you write reports and stuff. "Good" grammar still makes a favorable impression. For list of common "errors" and how to avoid them, check this out!

I really hope there aren't too many errors in this post. I'll feel really stupid, but please feel free to point them out.