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dictionary, English language, French, German, Italian, language, Latin, plenish, textspeak, txtspk, vocabulary, words, words you dislike, words you like
I wish I’d paid more attention in Latin. I got as far as ‘Caecilius est in horto’ and ‘Regina (or possibly Selina) est in culina’ before I gave up and started squeezing the bubbles out of my plastic-backed exercise books. It wasn’t a reflection upon the teaching staff but more my woeful grasp of nouns, verbs, adverbs and the subjunctive. I went on to score a stonking 33% in my end of year German exam, and to this day can only ask the way to the station. Not much use when I wouldn’t understand the answer.
I scrub round French ok but wish I was fluent, and secretly dream of learning Italian.
Yet the English language itself contains a positive cornucopia of delights. Words such as colander. Whoever came up with that one? Minx. Quiff. Antidisestablishmentarianism. Oast. Unguent. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Chortle. Curmudgeonly. Skiffle. Myriad.
I think I’d be undone in learning a foreign language by the sheer number of ways in which words can have more than one meaning – incidentally, the name for these is homonyms. Isn’t that in itself a fabulous word? Just thinking of examples now is making my head hurt, and I’m not trying it in Catalan, Serbian or Algerian. Press. Face. Bowl. And I bet the homonyms are different in other languages, so you’d still be adrift, even if you’d figured out that the ball you’d bowled wasn’t the same as the bowl you’d used to mix a cake in. Hint: if it was, you’re in trouble. Cake mix and cricket don’t mix.
And then there’s the minefield of pronunciation. At the start of my professional career I had the job interview from hell. It started with the interviewer talking about the amount of lipstick I was wearing – and didn’t get any better. The real low point was when I was trying to say to him that I was a chameleon, able to fit in and adapt to any environment. Only, having never to my recollection heard it said, I pronounced it ‘sham-ill-on’. Cue a scene rich with comedy potential if only I hadn’t been too busy being humiliated.
I didn’t get the job – unsurprisingly. Quite a relief actually because if I had, and if I had gone on to act all chameleon-like and adopted similar behavior and attitudes to the interviewer, I don’t think I’d have a friend left in all the world. And rightly so.
That reminds me. There’s a few words which make me feel distinctly queasy. Moist. Gleam. Phlegm. Verbose.
But what makes me feel positively bilious is like, totes, hilair, yah? Whatevs, babes. BTW IMHO txtspk is completely ruining the English language. See, I can’t even use it for a whole sentence, it’s too ridic, see? It’s one step too far along the vocabulary evolution scale.
Even the word blog is more than slightly ridiculous. And don’t get me started on whether you can plenish someone a drink, or have a surgence in fashion. Just putting ‘re’ in front of them fails to make them sensible. If I’d paid attention in class, I bet I would know why. It’s bound to be some ancient Latin rule.
What words make you cringe? Which would you scrub out of the dictionary, or wish would become common parlance?
My favourite word of the moment is currently “anatidaephobia” (being scared of ducks) both for its form and its meaning. For many years (since I began typing, in fact), I’ve really disliked the word “house” owing to the fact that when speed typing, it always comes out of my fingers as “hosue”. I had a similar issue with “purpose”, which amusingly arrived on the page as “porpuse”. Both these irritations subsided somewhat when computers arrived, as it was a whole lot easier to just delete the offending letters, without having to brandish a fast-mutating Tippex brush at them. I’ve often thought that the English language is a great language for description, whereas something like the German language isn’t so flexible. After all, they tend to run four words into one, where possible. Definitely not “the thing”.
I read somewhere that a striking quality of the English language is how it absorbs additional words without necessarily getting rid of other ones. So you end up with a whole range of adjectives which all describe something very similar, but have very slightly different meanings. This may sound deathly boring to most people but I found it really fascinating!
Like you, I love certain words. Felicitous. Lolling. Icicle. Mmmmm.
Don’t get me started! I hate the way nouns are being mutated into verbs – monetise (monetize) your blog, athletes were medaled and podiumed.
I am not ROFL.
One of the unexpected joys of being a stay at home dad of two toddlers has been sharing their discovery of new words. Current favourites are hullabaloo, gobbledygook, and nincompoop.
What always makes me smile is how they somehow manage to twist any conversation with a stranger in order to utilise all three within the same sentence.
I share your dislike for the word moist, which makes me cringe almost as much as flan.
I can’t stand all TOWIE inspired words, ‘Reem’ ‘Totes’ etc although I do use them when taking the mickey and just to annoy/wind up my husband, sometimes I reply to his texts in text speak ‘KK, IKR Lolz’, drives him nuts.
I also studied Latin, ‘amo, amas, amat…haha and Caecilius Iucundus & his illustrious life !
I am guilty of using ‘lol’ a lot when tying, just so people know I’m not being entirely serious, probably not necessary but I do it anyway…oops xx