Crazy English

Let's face it-- English is a crazy language. There is no egg in egg plant nor ham in hamburger 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 writters 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, two geese. So one moose, two meese? One index, two indices?
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 off all but one of them, what do you call it?
If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eat 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 #BIGCHAR {background: midnightblue; color: DCDCDC; font-size: 16pt; font-family:Arial, Tahoma; } #BIGCHAR {background: midnightblue; color: DCDCDC; font-size: 16pt; font-family:Arial, Tahoma; } 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 horsefull carriage or a strapful gown? Met a sung hero or experienced requited love? Have you ever run to 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 can fill 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.
Richard Lederer
richard.lederer@pobox.com
Cheers.

Be wise, be nice.

English is a Crazy Language (Part II)
August 17, 1996
Sometimes you have to believe that all English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what other language do people drive in a parkway and park in a driveway? In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? In what other language do privates eat in the general mess and generals eat in the private mess? In what other language do people ship by truck and send cargo by ship? In what other language can your nose run and your feet smell?
How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same and a bad licking and a good licking be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? How can sharp speech and blunt speech be the same and quite a lot and quite a few the same, while overlook and oversee are opposites? How can the weather be hot as hell one day and cold as hell the next? How can the expressions "What's going on?" and "What's coming off?" mean exactly the same thing?!?
If button and unbutton and tie and untie are opposites, why are loosen and unloosen and ravel and unravel he same? If bad is the opposite of good, hard the opposite of soft, and up the opposite of down, why are badly and goodly, hardly and softy, and upright and downright not opposing pairs? If harmless actions are the opposite of harmful nonactions, why are shameful and shameless behavior the same and pricey objects less expensive than priceless ones.
If appropriate and inappropriate remarks and passable and impassable mountain trails are opposites, why are flammable and inflammable materials, heritable and inheritable property, and passive and impassive people the same and valuable objects less treasured than invaluable ones? If uplift is the same as lift up, why are upset and set up opposite in meaning? Why are pertinent and impertinent, canny and uncanny, and famous and infamous neither opposites nor the same? How can raise and raze and reckless and wreckless be opposites when each pair contains the same sound?
Why is it that when the sun or the moon or the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible; that when I clip a coupon from a newspaper I separate it, but when I clip a coupon to a newspaper, I fasten it; and that when I wind up my watch, I start it, but when I wind up this essay, I shall end it?
English is a crazy language.
How can expressions like "I'm mad about my flat," "No football coaches allowed," "I'll come by in the morning and knock you up," and "Keep your pecker up" convey such different messages in two countries that purport to speak the same English?
How can it be easier to assent than to dissent but harder to ascend than to descend? Why it is that a man with hair on his head has more hair than a man with hairs on his head; that if you decide to be bad forever, you choose to be bad for good; and that if you choose to wear only your left shoe, then your left one is right and your right one is left? Right?
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English is a Crazy Language Part III
September 30, 1996
Has it ever struck you that we English users are constantly standing meaning on its head? Let's look at a number of familiar English words and phrases that turn out to mean the opposite or something very different from what we think they mean:
I could care less. I couldn't care less is the clearer, more accurate version. Why do so many people delete the negative from this statement? Because they are afraid that the n't . . . less combination will make a double negative, which is a no-no.
I really miss not seeing you. Whenever people say this to me, I feel like responding, "All right, I'll leave!" Here speakers throw in a gratuitous negative, not, even though I really miss seeing you is what they want to say.
The movie kept me literally glued to my seat. The chances of our buttocks being literally epoxied to a seat are about as small as the chances of our literally rolling in the aisles while watching a funny movie or literally drowning in tears while watching a sad one. We actually mean The movie kept me figuratively glued to my seat -- but who needs figuratively, anyway?
A non-stop flight. Never get on one of these. You'll never get down.
A near miss. A near miss is, in reality a collision. A close call is actually a near hit.
My idea fell between the cracks. If something fell between the cracks, didn't it land smack on the planks or the concrete? Shouldn't that be my idea fell into the cracks [or between the boards]?
I'll follow you to the ends of the earth. Let the word go out to the four corners of the earth that ever since Columbus we have known that the earth doesn't have any ends.
A hot water heater. Who heats hot water?
A hot cup of coffee. Here again the English language gets us in hot water. Who cares if the cup is hot? Surely we mean a cup of hot coffee.
Doughnut holes. Aren't those little treats really doughnut balls ? The holes are what's left in the original doughnut. (And if a candy cane is shaped like a cane, why isn't a doughnut shaped like a nut?)
I want to have my cake and eat it too. Shouldn't this timeworn clich??s be I want to eat my cake and have it too? Isn't the logical sequence that one hopes to eat the cake and then still possess it?
A one-night stand. So who's standing? Similarly, to sleep with someone.
The first century B.C. These hundred years occurred much longer ago than people imagined. What we call the first century B.C. was, in fact the last century B.C.
Daylight saving time. Not a single second of daylight is saved by this ploy.
The announcement was made by a nameless official. Just about everyone has a name, even officials. Surely what is meant is The announcement was made by an unnamed official.
Preplan, preboard, preheat, and prerecord. Aren't people who do this simply planning, boarding, heating, and recording? Who needs the pre-tentious prefix?
Put on your shoes and socks. This is an exceedingly difficult maneuver. Most of us put on our socks first, then our shoes.
A hit-and-run play. If you know your baseball, you know that the sequence constitutes a run-and-hit play.
The bus goes back and forth between the terminal and the airport. Again we find mass confusion about the order of events. You have to go forth before you can go back.
I got caught in one of the biggest traffic bottlenecks of the year. The bigger the bottleneck, the more freely the contents of the bottle flow through it. To be true to the metaphor, we should say, I got caught in one of the smallest traffic bottlenecks of the year.
Underwater and Underground. Things that we claim are underwater and underground are obviously surrounded by, not under the water and ground.
I lucked out. To luck out sounds as if you're out of luck. Don't you mean I lucked in?
Because we speakers and writers of English seem to have our heads screwed on backwards, we constantly misperceive our bodies, often saying just the opposite of what we mean:
Watch your head. I keep seeing this sign on low doorways, but I haven't figured out how to follow the instructions. Trying to watch your head is like trying to bite your teeth.
They're head over heels in love. That's nice, but all of us do almost everything head over heels . If we are trying to create an image of people doing cartwheels and somersaults, why don't we say, They're heels over head in love?
Put your best foot forward. Now let's see. . . . We have a good foot and a better foot -- but we don't have a third -- and best -- foot. It's our better foot we want to put forward. This grammar atrocity is akin to May the best team win. Usually there are only two teams in the contest.
Keep a stiff upper lip. When we are disappointed or afraid, which lip do we try to control? The lower lip, of course, is the one we are trying to keep from quivering.
I'm speaking tongue in cheek. So how can anyone understand you?
They do things behind my back. You want they should do things in front of your back?
They did it ass backwards. What's wrong with that? We do everything ass backwards.
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Được milou sửa chữa / chuyển vào 09:10 ngày 08/09/2002

(Part IV)
October 18, 1996
English is weird.
In the rigid expressions that wear tonal grooves in the record of our language, beck can appear only with call, cranny with nook, hue with cry, main with might, fettle only with fine, aback with taken, caboodle with kit, and spic and span only with each other. Why must all shrifts be short, all lucre filthy, all bystanders innocent, and all bedfellows strange? I'm convinced that some shrifts are lengthy and that some lucre is squeaky clean, and I've certainly met guilty bystanders and perfectly normal bedfellows.
Why is it that only swoops are fell? Sure, the verbivorous William Shakespeare invented the expression "one fell swoop," but why can't strokes, swings, acts, and the like also be fell? Why are we allowed to vent our spleens but never our kidneys or livers? Why must it be only our minds that are boggled and never our eyes or our hearts? Why can't eyes and jars be ajar, as well as doors? Why must aspersions always be cast and never hurled or lobbed?
Doesn't it seem just a little wifty that we can make amends but never just one amend; that no matter how carefully we comb through the annals of history, we can never discover just one annal; that we can never pull a shenanigan, be in a doldrum, eat an egg Benedict, or get a jitter, a willy, a delirium tremen, or a heebie-jeebie; and that, sifting through the wreckage of a disaster, we can never find just one smithereen?
Indeed, this whole business of plurals that don't have matching singulars reminds me to ask this burning question, one that has puzzled scholars for decades: If you have a bunch of odds and ends and you get rid of or sell off all but one of them, what do you call that doohickey with which you're left?
What do you make of the fact that we can talk about certain things and ideas only when they are absent? Once they appear, our blessed English doesn't allow us to describe them. Have you ever seen a horseful carriage or a strapful gown? Have you ever run into someone who was combobulated, sheveled, gruntled, chalant, plussed, ruly, gainly, maculate, pecunious, or peccable? Have you ever met a sung hero or experienced requited love? I know people who are no spring chickens, but where, pray tell, are the people who are spring chickens? Where are the people who actually would hurt a fly? All the time I meet people who are great shakes, who can cut the mustard, who can fight City Hall, who are my cup of tea, and whom I would touch with a ten-foot pole, but I can't talk about them in English -- and that is a laughing matter.
If the truth be told, all languages are a little crazy. As Walt Whitman might proclaim, they contradict themselves. That's because language is invented, not discovered, by boys and girls and men and women, not computers. As such, language reflects the creative and fearful asymmetry of the human race, which, of course, isn't really a race at all. That's why six, seven, eight, and nine change to sixty, seventy, eighty, and ninety, but two, three, four, and five do not become twoty, threety, fourty, and fivety. That's why first degree murder is more serious than third degree murder but a third degree burn is more serious than a first degree burn. That's why we can turn lights off and on but not out and in. That's why we wear a pair of pants but, except on ery cold days, not a pair of shirts. That's why we can open up the floor, climb the walls, raise the roof, pick up the house, and bring down the house.
In his essay "The Awful German Language," Mark Twain spoofs the confusion engendered by German gender by translating literally from a conversation in a German Sunday school book: "Gretchen. Wilhelm, where is the turnip? Wilhelm. She has gone to the kitchen. Gretchen. Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden? Wilhelm. It has gone to the opera." Twain continues: "A tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are ***less, dogs are male, cats are female -- tomcats included."
Still, you have to marvel at the unique lunacy of the English language, in which your house can simultaneously burn up and burn down, in which you fill in a form by filling out a form, in which you add up a column of figures by adding them down, in which your alarm clock goes off by going on, in which you are inoculated for measles by being inoculated against measles, and in which you first chop a tree down -- and then you chop it up.
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Được milou sửa chữa / chuyển vào 09:13 ngày 08/09/2002

The Return of Crazy English
I'm pleased to report that my Crazy English has just been reincarnated as a trade paperback book. This e***ion is not just a reformatting; it's a genuine expansion and improvement.
Crazy English the one book of mine that I've wanted to have a crack of rewriting. That's because the material has become such a ubiquitous presence on the Internet -- "We drive in a parkway, park in a driveway; our nose can run and our feet can smell" -- that it has spawned new vagaries and insights into the language that I hadn't imagined back in 1989. Now I've been able to integrate the best of these progeny into the new e***ion.
Here's a typical chapter from my reborn Crazy child:
Good Grief!
Not long ago, a couple that I know tooled down to a local car emporium to look over the latest products. Attracted to the low sticker price on the basic model, they told the salesman that they were considering buying an unadorned automobile and had no inclination to purchase any of the long list of options affixed to the side window of the vehicle they were inspecting.
"You'll have to pay $168 for the rear window wiper," the salesman explained.
"But we don't want the rear wiper," my friends protested.
And the salesman said: "We want to keep the sticker price low, but every car comes with the rear window wiper. So you have to buy it. It's a mandatory option."
Mandatory option is a telling example of the kind of pushme-pullyou doublespeak that pervades the language of business and politics these days. It is also a striking instance of an oxymoron.
"Good grief!" you exclaim. "What's an oxymoron?"
An oxymoron (I reply) is a figure of speech in which two incongruous, contradictory terms are yoked together in a small space. As a matter of fact, good grief is an oxymoron.
Appropriately, the word oxymoron is itself oxymoronic because it is formed from two Greek roots of opposite meaning -- oxys, "sharp, keen," and moros, "foolish," the same root that gives us the word moron. Other examples of foreign word parts oxymoronically drawn to each other are pianoforte ("soft-loud"), monopoly ("one many"), and sophomore ("wise fool"). If you know any sophomoric sophomores, you know how apt that oxymoron is.
I have long been amused by the name of a grocery store in my town, West Street Superette, since super means "large" and -ette means "small." If you have a superette in your town, it is a "large small" store.
Perhaps the best known oxymoron in the United States is one from comedian George Carlin's record Toledo Window Box, the delightful jumbo shrimp. Expand the expression to fresh frozen jumbo shrimp, and you have a double oxymoron.
Once you start collecting oxymora (just as the plural of phenomenon is phenomena, an oxymoron quickly becomes a list of oxymora), these compact two-word paradoxes start popping up everywhere you look. Among the prize specimens in my trophy case are these minor miracles, which, I hope, will go over better than a lead balloon:
old news, light heavyweight, even odds, original copy,,random order , recorded live ,,flat busted , standard deviation ,pretty ugly , freezer burn ,civil war, divorce court ,awful good ,criminal justice ,inside out, cardinal sin ,death benefit , Butthead ,small fortune , open secret ,a dull roar , conspicuously absent ,growing small ,constructive criticism ,same difference ,negative growth ,dry ice (or wine or beer), build down ,white chocolate (or gold) ,elevated subway ,industrial park, mobile home ,half naked , indoor bleachers ,open secret , benign neglect ,sight unseen , plastic silverware ,baby grand ,deliberate speed ,student teacher , benevolent despot ,loyal opposition , living end ,working vacation ,final draft ,idiot savant ,flexible freeze ,computer jock ,one-man band ,act naturally , Advanced BASIC ,press release ,kickstand ,loose tights, tight slacks
Literary oxymora, created accidentally on purpose, include Geoffrey Chaucer's hateful good, Edmund Spenser's proud humility, John Milton's darkness visible, Alexander Pope's "damn with faint praise," Lord Byron's melancholy merriment, James Thomson's expressive silence, Alfred, Lord Tennyson's falsely true, Ernest Hemingway's scalding coolness, and, the most quoted of all, William Shakespeare's "parting is such sweet sorrow." Abraham Lincoln's political opponent, Stephen Douglas, was known as the Little Giant, and, more recently, Dallas Cowboys football coach Tom Landry commented before a Super Bowl that he was feeling confidently scared.
Now, if you are willing to stretch the oxymoronic concept and e***orialize unabashedly, you will expand your oxymoronic list considerably. Thus, we can observe natural oxymora, literary oxymora, and opinion oxymora, three categories that are not always mutually exclusive:
nonworking mother, educational television ,military intelligence, rock music ,young Republican , civil engineer ,peace offensive, designer jeans ,Peacekeeper Missile, postal service ,war games , Amtrak schedule ,business ethics ,Greater(your choice of scapegoat city) ,United Nations, President (your choice of scapegoat president) ,athletic scholarship ,educational television ,Microsoft Works, airline food ,legal brief, honest politician ,safe *** , free love ,Moral Majority
Oxymora lurk even in place names, like Little Big Horn, Old New York, and Fork Union, and in single words, like bittersweet, firewater, preposterous, semiboneless, spendthrift, wholesome, and Noyes. If you have trouble understanding that last one, examine its first two and then its last three letters.
Good grief! Oxymora are everywhere!
?â Richard Lederer
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Đặ?ỏằÊc milou sỏằưa chỏằ?a / chuyỏằfn vào 09:29 ngày 08/09/2002

Are you guy write all this stuff? Or collected on Net.
Được BOOTY_DELICIOUS sửa chữa / chuyển vào 04:22 ngày 10/09/2002

Richard Lederer wrote these.
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Interesting !
Is he a author or ttvn member ? sory i don't know who is this guy!

About Richard Lederer, by himself:
Not long ago, I visited a nearby progressive elementary school and chatted for about forty-five minutes with the sixth graders about the joys of language and the writing life. One of the boys in the class asked me, "Dr. Lederer, where do you get your ideas for your books?"
Ever since I became a writer, I had found that question the most difficult to answer and had only recently come up with an analogy that I thought would satisfy both my audience and me. Pouncing on the opportunity to unveil my spanking new explanation, I countered with, "Where does the spider get its web?"
The idea, of course, was that the spider is not aware how it spins out its intricate and beautiful patterns with the silky material that is simply a natural part of itself. Asking a writer to account for the genesis of his or her ideas is as futile as asking a spider the source of its web and method of its construction.
The young man, in response to my question, appeared thoughtful for a moment. Then he looked me squarely in the eye and shot right back, "The spider gets its web from its butt!"
I checked out the boy's assertion, and, sure enough, spiders do produce their silk from glands located in their posteriors. The glands open through tiny spinnerets located at the hind end of the abdomen. Well, it may be that for lo these many years I've been talking and writing through my butt, but that doesn't stop me from being an unrepentant verbivore.
I was the kind of child who, almost as soon as he could talk, saw a butterfly and cooed, "Oh, goody. A butterfly will flutter by." Even as a high-school student, I knew that Elvis Presley, born three years before me, would become immortal because I saw that "Elvis Lives" is a two-word anagram.
Still, I entered Haverford College as a pre-medical student but soon found that I was reading the chemistry books for their literary value. I became an English major and then attended Harvard Law School, where I found that I read the law cases for their literary value. So rather than fighting my verbivorous instincts, I switched into a Masters of Arts and Teaching program at Harvard. That led to a position at St. Paul's School, in Concord, NH, where I taught English and media for 27 wonderful years. I would have gladly served them all their days, but my earning a Ph.D. in English and Linguistics from the University of New Hampshire inspired me to write my books on language. The enthusiastic popular response to these books, beginning with Anguished English, gave me the opportunity to leave the St. Paul's community to extend my mission of teachership.
That's what I do now, as a fly-by-the-roof-of-the-mouth user- friendly English teacher, Wizard of Idiom, Attila the Pun, and Conan the Grammarian.
More than a million of my books are in print, most with Pocket Books and Dell. My column, "Looking at Language," reaches more than a million readers through newspapers and magazines across the United States. My books have been Book-of-the-Month Club and Literary Guild alternate selections, and my work has appeared in the likes of the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, National Review, and Reader's Digest.
My column, "Looking at Language," appears in newspapers throughout the United States and in magazines including, The Toastmaster, Pages, Farmers' Almanac, Writer's Digest, SPELL/Binder, Mensa Bulletin, JAAMT, Perspectives, On Air, Annals of Improbable Research, Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics, and Journal of Court Reporters.
My weekly radio show, "A Way With Words," is a powerful hour full that celebrates (what else?) that tremendous, stupendous, end-over-endous adventure we call language. My co-host, Charles Harrington Elster, and I offer a fabulous confabulation about and open forum for all aspects of language -- from puns to punctuation, from pronouns to pronunciation. The program is broadcast each Sunday, at 10:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m.,on KPBS, San Diego Public Radio, 89.5 FM. You can catch it streaming live (PST) by going to the KPBS website at kpbs.org, clicking on the "radio" icon and then "tune in."
I broadcast regularly on a number of major market public and clear-channel commercial radio stations, including Wisconsin and Boston Public Radio and WHAM in Rochester, CFRB in Toronto, KSFO in San Francisco, and WHIZ in Zanesville, OH. I have appeared a number of times on just about every major radio station in the U.S., including Larry King radio, the Osgood Files, G. Gordon Liddy, Tom Snyder, Roy Leonard, Dave Maynard, David Brudnoy, and television shows, such as the Today Show, and CNN Prime Time.
I have just been awarded the Golden Gavel for 2002 by Toastmasters International.
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clap clap to milou .
it's vẻy interesting .

SLICK
LOVE ? IT'S TERIBLE THING !
REALLY ?????