You Think English Is Easy?


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You think English is easy?

1) The bandage was wound around the wound.
2) The farm was used to produce produce.
3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
4) We must polish the Polish furniture..
5) He could lead if he would get the lead out.
6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert..
7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
8) A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
10) I did not object to the object.
11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
13) They were too close to the door to close it.
14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.
15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
18) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear..
19) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
20) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
Let's face it - English is a crazy 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 index, 2 indices? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? 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? 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?
How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? 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 goes off by going on.
English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all. That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible. English is easy, isn't it? :unsure:

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German must be a cow too with some of those long tongue twisting words!! When I worked at Beeston Boiler Co years back, the auto foundry plant was German, damned if I could pronounce some of the things on the elec schematics, some of those words had dozens of letters in them! Good job the symbols were pretty universal.

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German must be a cow too with some of those long tongue twisting words!! When I worked at Beeston Boiler Co years back, the auto foundry plant was German, damned if I could pronounce some of the things on the elec schematics, some of those words had dozens of letters in them! Good job the symbols were pretty universal.

It is because they have the habit of sticking words together, like, Hochleistungskettenwirkautomat for, High-performance knitting machine.

here is a simple one to decipher Kompaktmaschine for, compact machine

another simple one Textilmaschinenfabrik for, textile machine maker

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I don't know whether to put my wethers out in the bad weather today.

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#1 Michael Booth Excellent post

English isn't easy. Everyday as I teach it. I am asked Why? Why? Why? I am sick of why

In fact it was only last night I had to try to explain fill in the forms or fill out the forms.

I never realized how hard English was, until I started to teach English as a second language (ESL) It is surprising how we took everything for granted and never questioned anything at school. I can't remember any student during my school days saying "Why do you have to do it that way?" or Why do you use the same words for different things.

I was teaching Business English, literacy and numeracy in Australia for 13 years. I never had the problems I encounter teaching ESL. Here not only do I need to know the vocabulary and what it means, but I also have to try to explain why it is used in a certain way.

Another one today. Why is it when someone sneezes do you say bless you? I had to think hard before I answered this one.

He lives to make many lives happy.

She felt the felt in her hand.

He took the bow and arrow from the king on the bow of the ship and gave the king a bow as he left.

My dear there are deer over here. Why don't we put a s on the end of deer when we talk about many deer?

We have 1 steer or many steers, but steers cannot steer a car, a boat or a bicycle.

But not just with English, Chinese has similar problems. In some cases one character can be used for many different words.

Keep up the good work. Very interesting topic.

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To understand "WHY" you have to read the history of our language and how much all the invaders influenced it, from the Vikings to the other Norsemen, the Normans, to the Danes, Romans, Goth's Angles, etc.

How dialect played a part, one of the things that amazed me, in the Middle Ages people travelling the country would not have understood a traveller easily, different forms of English were spoke just a few miles apart..

Want an egg for breakfast?? Better "bone up" on the names an egg was called in the areas you'll be travelling through.

Ironically the Normans did more to standardize English than any other invader, even though their native language was a form of French.

The the printing press made the biggest impact, words come and go, the language is evolving all the time.

English "English" dropped dove, I cannot recall hearing the word until I moved stateside, where it's in common use, as are many older English words.

Researching the UK coal industry reveals a lot of spellings now gone from the language, take coal, at the turn of the 20th century it was still spelled as cole, or coles in certain parts of the country.

I just accept as it is these days, odd peculiar, probably the Italians, French, Danes and even the Russians have similar peculiarities in their languages???

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Jail and goal is a strange one. Do some folk pronounce goal as jail?

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Shouldn't that be GAOL??? as in "jail"??

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Yes, yes, yes, I hadn't been to the pub. I'm having to tidy the shed and my brain and fingers weren't in sync.

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He was thinking of this weekends football fixtures Mike....LOL

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Cheeky bu66er !!!!!!

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