The English Language Is Weird: Use It With Care

On the surface, English appears so simple, but look a little closer and you'll see it contains so many exceptions, variations, contradictions, and so many gosh-darn words that mean the same gosh-darn thing.

On one hand we have social media — the veritable Wild West where anything goes and no one is safe, and on the other we have language tools like Grammarly which will not rest until all humanity is sucked out of it. Two extremes, and as is usually the case these days, no middle ground.

As a native speaker who has tried on several occasions to learn another language but has given up due to lack of intelligence, motivation, and/or energy, I really feel for those non-native speakers on the outside looking in. And my sympathy boils down to one thing, which I find myself screaming internally from time to time:

“Most native speakers don’t understand English, so how the heck is anyone else supposed to?”

Ask any English speaker who knows no other language (as an example, let’s take your middle-aged, white neighbour Bill, with his Union Jack tattoo on his calf, who stares a little too long at that non-white family across the road) and they might say something idiotic such as “English is the easiest language in the world to learn”, whilst simultaneously typing up some 300 word Facebook post with no punctuation on how much of a “disgrace” it is that “these people” are “coming over here not speaking our language”.

People like Bill are filled with prejudice, sure, but this isn’t about that. Why does Bill think his language is so easy, and how can he assume that it is simply laziness that stops people learning it? Perhaps because so many people worldwide speak it, so he assumes that anyone who doesn’t is a moron? It’s hard to say. But on the flipside, Bill goes to Benidorm for his summer holidays and gets flummoxed when a waiter asks him something in Spanish (the second or third most globally spoken language), and gets frustrated when said waiter doesn’t understand Bill’s retort, which is just saying something in English very loudly while occasionally putting an ‘O’ at the end of some words… “EL BEER-O, SIL VOUS PLAY. Honestly Sheila, what’s this guy’s problem?”

But that’s Bill. What about everyone else?

My wife is a primary school teacher, and she tells me how much of a problem it is in school to get kids interested in English lessons.

“Why do we need to know this stuff?” little Billy might say. “We speak and write and read every day. I know it all.”

“Oh, Billy. You don’t know jack.”

“Yeah I do, he’s right there,” he says, picking his nose with one finger and pointing at another dribbling child with the other.

Being immersed in something so much that it becomes second nature to you does not mean that you understand it.

“Billy, do you know how an airplane works while you’re sitting on it, or how your lungs work as you’re breathing, or how your eyeballs and eyelids work in perfect unison, without you even thinking about it?”

He stares back in return dumbly, his eyes glaze over a little. He’s still pointing at Jack. We know what sort of person he’ll grow in to with that attitude, don’t we?

Little Billy in school doesn’t know anything about English, and neither do most grown ups. But the problem is they don’t want to know. It’s a confusing, contradictory, convoluted mess that is disrespected and taken for granted every minute of every day.

But, in a way, who can blame them? English is a language in which all rules are thrown out the window and seemingly made up on the fly (take that sentence for example, you understand it, but what the hell does it actually mean?). The sounds of it’s consonants and vowels can simultaneously make perfect sense, but also lead to entirely contradictory phenomenon like the word ‘fish’, which can technically be spelled ‘ghoti’ if you follow certain rules of phonics.

It is a language which has over a million words, and yet a crane is both a bird and a tall metallic machine used to lift and move heavy objects. A dog in the woods can bark at the bark on a tree.

It is also extremely susceptible to emphasis in speech, which can entirely change the meaning of a sentence, with no real way to incorporate this in to normal, everyday writing (where use of bold and italics aren’t an option):

“I never said Billy was an idiot”

“I never said Billy was an idiot”

“I never said Billy was an idiot”

“I never said Billy was an idiot”

It is a language in which a woodcutter can chop a tree down and then chop it up, and that apparently makes perfect sense. As does the following sentence, which is technically both reasonable and correct, both in structure and composition:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Even the essential rules we teach our kids in school are wrong. Remember the rule “I before E except after C”? Weird, huh?

And the endless stream of idioms which have been absorbed in to the language that everyone uses but no one understands, whose misuse is pretty much the only use nowadays (try explaining the term ‘have your cake and eat it’ to a non-native speaker, and see what I mean).

And so on.

Deary me.

Rover likes to bark at the bark. Rover is a bad dog — Photo by Tadeusz Lakota on Unsplash

Now, you might be thinking these examples are all well and good, but every language has it’s own strange tongue twisters and problematic rules. In that, English is not alone, and that is indeed a fact. But English seems to have more than most, doesn’t it? For a supposedly globally accessible language, it seems a little inaccessible at times, right?

We can’t be surprised when it’s origins are Anglo-Saxon, Roman, Latin, Celtic, Danish, Germanic, French and who-knows-what-else all muddled together. When Bill looks with horror at his Spanish waiter not understanding his shouted demands, he doesn’t realise his language is actually a hodge-podge of about a dozen itself, and that there was a time when the roles would be reversed, and another nation would hear this confusing new language and shudder.

So what is the way forward here: shall we dumb the language down, or do we dig our heels in and just be better ourselves?

Well, a bit of all both I’d say. Good old compromise.

Languages are always going to evolve and change, and English has been doing that since it first mutated in to existence. Until it was standardised, you had two different people, living next door in some pokey little English village, writing the same passage in two different ways, and no one knew which was right and which was wrong, they just accepted both.

Standardisation was our way of saying to one of them: “No Geoffrey, you can’t spell egg like egge, what’s wrong with you? What do you mean why? Because I’ve just invented this thing called a dictionary that proves you’re wrong, that’s why.”

That degree of standardisation, while oppressive if pushed too far, has been lost a little. At one extreme we have the ‘grammar nazis’ online who find pleasure in putting people down about their incorrect usage or errors, and on the other we have 600 word social media rants without a single comma or full stop that make my eyes bleed (yes Sharon, I know you don’t like the new Facebook layout, but if you spoke like this in real life without a pause you’d probably be sectioned).

So why is there no middle ground here?

Essentially, evolution in language happens through an acceptance of a variation, so if enough people decided that egg would be better spelled like egge again, and kept saying so and writing it that way, then those who standardise these things would record it as such, and it would no longer be considered incorrect. Simple as that. There needs to be some degree of keeping this thing under control, while still allowing it to grow and change. But nowadays, a pocket of people over the course of a week can decide to fry up an ‘egge’ on Instagram and if they have enough influence everyone will hold up their arms and say that spelling it with one ‘e’ is barbaric and uncool and what those “boomers” do.

There needs to be a bit of pushback from these folks that decide what is what with English.

“You know what, no. There are enough bloody words as it is. In fact, rather than our ‘word of the year’ celebrating the best word, let’s pick the worst and just all agree to stop using it forever, okay?”

It seems any old nonsense becomes accepted whether standardised or not, so people lose respect for the language and think anything goes. Like I said before, English has become like the Wild West of languages, with crimes being committed and nothing being kept safe or sacred.

Now just to be clear, I’m not a stickler for correctness myself. Chuck this article through Grammarly or some such and there’ll be squiggly lines all over the place. And I welcome them. The more squiggly lines that appear the better, in my opinion, because I’m a human being, not a lifeless robot like Grammarly wants me to be.

The written word is all for variation, interesting combinations, pushing those boundaries of what is accepted as the norm, and trying to show just what words can do and can be. That is why language is beautiful. And that is why the English language is beautiful and has persevered.

It is a mess of countless languages before it, smashed together in to a hot mess of confusing, contradictory rules and guidelines that are repeatedly broken.

I’m not calling for mass reform here. I love the English language for its messiness and confusing nature. It makes it interesting and challenging and gives wiggle room for writers. We all have plenty to work with, that’s for sure.

But let’s be better, shall we? Let’s respect this thing and reign it in a little, showing it the respect it deserves, while still giving it space and freedom to express itself when appropriate.

Think of it like an unruly teenager trying to find themselves. We’ve allowed them a bit of freedom, but there’s always a limit, right? Perhaps if that teenager has taken to sacrificing your neighbour’s cat for fun, and decides to eat nothing but thumbtacks we should set some put our foot down a little, don’t ya think?

Let’s be a bit more patient and understanding to non-native speakers while we’re at it, and additional language speakers who mispronounce a word or use formal words in informal situations and all of that. If you find yourself annoyed by a non-native speaker saying something wrong, try to learn another language yourself and see how bloody difficult it is.

The English language is one of the greatest things our species has ever invented, so let’s not say “who cares” if someone corrects our spelling or word choice or lack of punctuation.

Similarly, let’s not be dickheads about it and correct minor things and think ourselves better than others because you know how to use a bloody semi-colon (don’t get me started), or because you grew up speaking the language when others have not. Let’s just be more aware of this beautiful thing we all use and don’t understand, let’s preserve it and cherish it and cut off the malignant growths that might just do it in.

Let’s accept that it is bloody confusing and we all make mistakes with it, but let’s strive to be better, to learn and understand and not just demand that it be changed in our dictionaries, or be added to some informal list of accepted words, or roll our eyes when/if someone criticises our 200 word social media post that uses precisely one comma and nothing else throughout.

This language is a powerful thing, you know. Use it with care.