Funny

English is a Funny Language


Let's face it – English is a funny language. There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or 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 blouse, 2 blice?

Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend, that you comb through annals of history but not a single annal? 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? If you wrote a letter, perhaps you bote your tongue?

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? Park on driveways and drive on parkways?

How can a »slim chance« and a »fat chance« be the same, while a »wise man« and »wise guy« are opposites? How can overlook and oversee be opposites, while »quite a lot« and »quite a few« are alike? How can the weather be »hot as hell« one day and »cold as hell« another?

Have you noticed that we talk about certain things only when they are absent? Have you ever seen a horseful carriage or a strapful gown? Met a sung hero or experienced requited love? Have you ever run into someone who was combobulated, gruntled, ruly or peccable? And where are all those people who are spring chickens or who would actually hurt a fly?

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 clock goes off by going on.

English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race (which, of course, isn't a race at all). That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible. And why, when I wind up my watch, I start it, but when I wind up this essay, I end it?

Now I know why I flunked my English. It's not my fault, the silly language doesn't quite know whether it's coming or going.

Philip Castle, in Kurt Vonnegut´s »Cat´s Cradle« (1963), is remembering how, during a terrible plague, he and his father walked among bodies piled high inside and outside of a jungle hospital:

It was all we could do to find a live patient to treat. In bed after bed we found dead people.
»And Father started giggling,« Castle continued.
»He couldn´t stop. He walked out into the night with his flashlight. He was still giggling. He was making the flashlight beam dance over all the dead people stacked outside. He put his hand on my head, and do you know what that marvelous man said to me?« asked Castle.
»Nope.«
»`Son,´ my father said to me, `someday this will all be yours.´«

Some people find 'funny' so hard to define.

For me it is easy.

Funny makes me laugh.

Funny is the unexpected. The basis of most jokes are a punch line that is not obvious--lthe less obvious, the funnier it is. There are also several meanings for funny.

That boy looks funny wearing that red hat and blue shirt with those yellow pants.

This sandwiuch tastes funny--do you think it went bad sitting in the trunk of the car for a week?

Funny you should mention it.....

Nothing is INTRINSICALLY funny, to be sure, but to me nothing is so consistently, profoundly, earth-shakingly funny as we animals in the act of mating. Reader, if you are young and would live on love; if in the flights of intercourse you feel that you and your beloved are fit models for a Phidias, for a Michelangelo – then don´t, I implore you, be so foolish as to include among the trappings of your love-nest a good plate mirror. For a mirror can reflect only what it sees, and what it sees is screamingly funny.

I hit my funny bone once. It wasn't funny because that elbow really hurt. I don't know why someone decided to call the bone the humourous or was that humerus? Maybe somebody else studied Anatomy and Physiology recently and remembers how the bone was spelled in latin or something.