Set Up Like A
Deck Of Cards

The English Lanuguage

“I take it you already know

Of tough and bough and cough and dough?

Others may stumble, but not you

On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?

Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,

To learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word

That looks like beard and sounds like bird,

And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead -

For goodness’ sake, don’t call it deed!

Watch out for meat and great and threat

(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).

A moth is not a moth in mother,

Nor both in bother, broth in brother,

And here is not a match for there,

Nor dear and fear for bear and pear.

And then there’s dose and rose and lose -

Just look them up - and goose and choose,

And cork and work, and card and ward,

And font and front, and word and sword,

And do and go, and thwart and cart -

Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start!

A dreadful language? Man alive!

I’d mastered it when I was five!”

-Anonymous (but read in ‘i before e (except after c)’, by Judy Parkinson).

Symmetricalism

A word I used in the middle of a sentence today, when the word ‘symmetry’ failed to show up in my vocabulary.  I knew it wasn’t right, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

It was like one of those times when you write a word you’ve used a million times before, only this time it looks wrong.  You know something’s wrong, but you don’t know exactly what.

(Every now and then, I confuse maybe/maby & baby/baybe.  And a true story - one time in school, I wrote a story and titled it ‘Whas It?’, crossed out the error and made the same mistake a second time.  Crossed it out and I SWEAR TO GOD, I did it again.)

Do you speak English? Well I do, so…

At work today, I had to speak to a couple of companies in Stockholm.  I spoke to maybe seven different people in one hour and every one of them answered the phone in Swedish.

Every time, my opening line was “Hi, do you speak English?” and every time the person I was speaking to immediately switched to perfect English.

There was one lady I spoke to who, when I asked if she could speak English, sounded quite embarassed and said, “a little bit.”  She had a strong Swedish accent, but I could understand her perfectly.  The fact that she seemed to think that her English wasn’t good enough killed me and I made a point of telling her how good it was before we finished talking.

It was pretty damn impressive and it made me feel useless for only knowing the minimum amount of French and German it is possible to know.  I wish I’d learned a second language when I was younger.