English Has Rules, Or So I Am Told
“The people heard it, and approved the doctrine, and immediately practiced the contrary.”
(Ben Franklin)
I have come to the conclusion that this whole “English has rules” thingy is a scam. If we are honest, what we call the Rules of English is something a group of Naval Aviators would come up with during a good night in a bad bar. My top ten “I cannot believe they call these rules, rules” are:
- If there is a rule for plural v. singular words, it escapes me. A couple of examples. The word for more than one car is “cars,” but the word for more than one shrimp is not “shrimps?” And why is more than one child, children and not childs? It baffles me, or should I say it is “baffling to me?”
- We all know the rule: “I before E, except after C,” unless of course the words are: achieve, belief, caffeine, field, friend, height, neighbor, protein, seize, their, weigh, and the list goes on. Weird, right?
- What is with words that are spelled the same, but have different meanings? For example, record as in my old vinyl record, and record as in record a voice message. They don’t even sound the same when spoken. Then there is lie as in lie down and lie as in to tell a lie to someone. They’re not only spelled the same but also sound the same. I will often lie down, but I will never lie before doing so.
- Why do some nouns have corresponding verbs and others don’t? writers write and painters paint, but fingers don’t “fing” and hammers don’t “ham.” Explain that to me without fing at me.
- Why do people claim Americans and the British speak the same language? We don’t even spell, let alone pronounce, many of the same words the same way. Color/colour, gray/grey, behavior/behaviour, and the infamous aluminum/aluminium. Then getting ‘knocked up’ across the pond means to wake up. Here in the States that phrase has a slightly different meaning…
- Why do we consider it correct to say “that nice little old plump white dog,” but weird to say “that old white plump little nice dog?” Yes, there is a nice complicated rule for that, one of the few that seems to be followed all the time without anyone knowing about it.
- Why do we have so many future tenses? Don’t believe me, then ponder this, if you are asked what you’re having for dinner, a correct response would be (well correct if you’re having pizza): “I’ll get pizza” and “I’m getting pizza.” Both mean the same but have a different future tense. That is just the tip of the iceberg, the experts say there can be as many as eight different future tenses depending on the topic. Of course, the “experts” also tell us that English has “rules.”
- Don’t even get me started on phrasal verbs – two or more words strung together as a verb that have a totally different meaning than when the words are used alone. “If you “go over” someone’s homework, you’re reviewing it, not literally moving over it. Of course, it you “go over” something while flying, you re actually moving over it. And if you “run something by” someone, you’re briefly updating them, not literally running past them with an object in your hands.” Then there’s “blow up” which has no relationship to the words “blow” and “up,” except they are part of the English language. This stuff makes me want to explode.
- And I am this many years old when I found out that English has a rule about lines! Really. There are three different dashed lines. Yep, the Em-dash: —; the En-dash: –; and the Hyphen: –. Honestly. As explained by the Leo School in the UK:
“hyphens are commonly used to separate compound words and names (e.g. “well-known,” “mass-produced,” “Jean-Paul”), en-dash is slightly longer than a hyphen and is used to separate numbers/dates in a range (e.g. pages 200–250, 1920–1930, July–September), while em-dash, the longest of all, separates words in a sentence (e.g. They had three granddaughters—Elizabeth, Jane, and Kitty).”
Of course, we have not listened to the Brits since the Revolutionary War of 1775-1783, so I am going to continue ignoring this “rule” about itty-bitty dashed lines and just use the one on my keyboard for everything.
- I can understand using flock for a group of birds, pack for a group of animals, and a school for a group of fish. But why is it a pack of wolves, a herd of cows, and a flock of sheep – all of which are animals? And for the record, sheep are not fish! But it gets even better – there’s “a parliament of owls,“ “a mischief of rats,“ “an ambush of tigers,“ and “an unkindness of ravens.”
The one thing my English teachers and professors taught me is that rules are rules…except in English where rules are rules except the rules are not really rules.