"Irony" Man

     If you were asked what word in the English language was the most misunderstood or misused, what would you say? Would it be "literally", when it is used in sentences such as, "It was literally raining cats and dogs"? Or would you suggest "like", one of the words that is striving to take the throne away from "um" for the word most used when we are filling time between thoughts. However, the writers from Dictionary.com have nominated another word for the most misused in English, "ironic".

     According the their article,

"Often the word “ironic” is misused to remark on a coincidence, such as “This is the third time today we've run into each other. How ironic.”

It is also mistakenly used to describe something out of the ordinary or unusual: “Yesterday was a beautiful, warm day in November. It was really ironic.”

And, unfortunately, it is sometimes used to simply emphasize something interesting. For example, “Ironically, it was the best movie I've seen all year!”"

     Another important misuse of "ironic" is when it is used incorrectly in the place of the "sarcasm". The only time when something is really ironic, is when it is the exact opposite of it's literal meaning. A statement such as, "It's been such a good day" would be ironic if you were using it to describe the day you were late to work, wrecked your car, and got soaked in the rain. A sarcastic statement would be something like saying something like, "Wow, your shirt is so nice" to someone who has theirs caught on a nail and ripped, and is obviously embarrassed by it. The main difference between irony and sarcasm, is that with sarcasm, you are deliberately trying to taunt, harass or make fun of someone, while with irony you are not. 

     To learn more about irony and the different types of it there are, you can go to hotword.dictionary.com/ironic/.

1. http://hotword.dictionary.com/ironic/

2. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

It's a question of instinct

     I saw this on reddit the other day and couldn't help but share. One of my major problems when it comes to English is that I can't remember all of the rules most of the time. Which is embarrassing because I am a native speaker and, other than a few snippets of Spanish, it is the only language I know.

    However, not all my grammatical hope is lost. Sometimes I can tell just by looking sometimes that I have made an error somewhere. It doesn't work all the time, and thank God I have spell check, or it would be infinitely worse. I couldn't tell you why something may be wrong, but a lot of the time, it will just look off. When I saw the picture below, I took a little bit of solace in the fact that I may not be the only one whose brain works like that.

1. http://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/1dl2nt/this_is_english_basically/

"Yo yo-yo"

     One of the problems with the English language is that it does not have a gender neutral pronoun. Over the years, many have tried to come up with something to use instead of the standard him or her. Back in the 1880s, lawyer Charles Converse proposed "thon", a mix of the words "that" and "one". Other words put forward to fill the gap have been "nee", "heesh", "huh". While none of these ever caught on, a new contender for the gender neutral crown has come from some children in Baltimore. These children have begun using the word "yo" in the place of "he" or "she" to fill the gender neutral gap.

      Margaret Troyer, a former teacher, published a paper showing that "yo" was replacing "he" and "she" in every day usage for many of her students. Troyer first noticed the change while she was teaching children in a Baltimore-area middle school. From the NPR article on the story:

"Some examples would be 'yo wearing a jacket,' " Troyer says, referring to her research. "Another example from the paper is, 'Yo threw a thumbtack at me,' which is a typical middle school example."
So Troyer began to study her students. She gave them blank cartoons and asked them to fill in the captions — many of the cartoon characters were androgynous.
Troyer found the kids used "yo" instead of "he" or "she" when they didn't know the gender of the character. But they also used "yo" as a substitute even when they did know the gender.
"They said things like, 'Yo put his foot on the desk.' So it was clear from this that they knew it was a male person, but they were just using 'yo' to refer to the person," says Troyer. "And then in other sentences they would use 'yo' to refer to a female as well."

     While the adoption of a new gender neutral pronoun is unusual, Christine Mallinson, a sociolinguist at the University of Maryland, isn't quite sure if it will stick around. "It'll be interesting to see whether they keep that usage as they become adults. Do they keep that in the workplace? If that's the case, it might persist," says Mallinson. "But sometimes slang or linguistic innovations in middle or high school get dropped out as people become adult users of English."

     What do you think? Do you think "yo" is here to stay? Did you have any slang or made up words that you or your friends came up with in school that you don't use anymore? Let us know in the comments!





1. http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/04/25/178788893/yo-said-what
2. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8f/Us_yoyo_national_2a.jpg

Lost letters

    If a restaurant or some other establishment wants to add an older, quainter atmosphere to their establishment, the quickest and easiest method is to add "ye olde" to the front of their name. However, what does this phrase mean? In simple terms, "ye olde" is an older antiquated method of saying. "the old". While dropping the "e" off of "olde" over the years is an understandable shortening, how in the world did the "y" in "ye" come to mean the "th" sound? As it turns out, the Europeans are to blame.

     Well, the Europeans were not the problem really. Their languages, however, are what is to blame. Originally, English included a letter called the thorn, þ. This letter had its roots in the old runic alphabet, coming from the thurisaz rune.

Now, the rune/letter changed shape many times as it was passed down through the centuries. Going from a þ, which kept the same basic shape of the rune, the letter eventually ended up looking like Ƿ. Now all of this was fine and dandy up until the printing presses first came to England. As most of the European languages didn't contain the thorn, the English printers with a quandary, what were they going to do for the letter thorn?

     Fortunately, one bright printer, whose name is lost to history, came up with the solution. In the blackletter, or Gothic script that was popular at the time, the thorn looked very similar to the letter "y". Because of this, printers started simply printing "y" for thorn, and the use of the letter died out. Eventually, English speakers started using the two letters "t" and "h" placed side by side for the "th" sound instead of the "y", and "y", was given a sound of its own.

    As often happens, old things become new again and "ye" started to make a comeback as part of "ye olde" being added to the descriptions or names of things to give them an aged feel. However, there was a problem. Instead of pronouncing the "ye" as "the", most were pronouncing it as "ye". While the spelling had come back, it left the rules for how it was supposed to be pronounced behind. While it reality it doesn't matter if you pronounce it as "the" or "ye", at least you know the way it supposed to "be".







1. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/11/12/31017/737
2. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ye
3. http://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2011/01/08/the-origin-of-ye-in-ye-olde-shoppe/
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%9A%A6
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_olde

"Borrowed" Words

Saw this on Reddit, and couldn't help posting it. With as many borrowed words as English has, it seems like we have done this many times in the past.

1. http://i.imgur.com/wXPREnB.jpg

"And now I know my ABC's"

     Letters are the basic building blocks of any language. And as any language evolves, the number of letters in it's particular alphabet can rise and fall. Almost all English speakers are aware that there are currently 26 letters in the English alphabet. However, as recently as the very early 1900's there was an additional letter in the English alphabet. That extra letter was, "&", the ampersand.
     The ampersand symbol is not an invention of the English language. The first example we have comes from a scrap of papyrus from around 45 AD. The ampersand symbol first came into being as the cursive of the Latin word "et", which means "and". As the ancient Roman scribes were writing, the two letters of et began to be joined, and eventually formed the symbol we know today.
     The name ampersand comes from the early 1800's where the ampersand symbol was printed at the end of English alphabet charts as the 27th letter. When children in school would recite the alphabet, any letter that could be used as a word was preceded by the words per se which is latin for by itself. For example instead of just saying the letter "I", the children would say, "and per se I" As the ampersand was the last letter on the chart, the phrase would go "X, Y, Z, and per se and." At some point, people began saying the last part compressed together, and instead of "and per se and" it became "ampersand". Eventually, around the 1900's, the ampersand began to be dropped off of the letter charts, leaving us with the 26 letters that English has today. 
1. http://hotword.dictionary.com/ampersand/?fb_ref=hotword_activity
2. http://www.adobe.com/type/topics/theampersand.html
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand
4. http://www.word-detective.com/052003.html#ampersand
5. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ampersand
6. http://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/112/

The Simplified Spelling Board

     I recently saw this link on io9.com on why we don't spell many English phonetically (how they sound). It is from there that I first heard about the Simplified Spelling Board. This Simplified Spelling Board was formed in 1906 with the express goal of simplifying the spelling of English language. One of the main proponents of this was the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie wanted to simplify the spelling of the English language so that it could be used as a tool for world peace by having a simple, easy to learn language that everyone could use. However, as any child learning English in school, or any non native English speaker learns very quickly, the way we spell things, the rules we have for how to change tenses and make plurals, as well as the words that are spelled the same but have vastly different meanings, English can be anything but easy to learn.

     Carnegie's board was set up to handle the first problem, spelling words completely unlike they are pronounced. This one has bugged me since school, and there are still times when I come upon an unfamiliar word, think it's pronounced one way, only to find it's pronounced differently. This is especially a problem for me, because usually when I learn something a certain way, it is nigh impossible for me to get it out of my head, even if it is wrong. Some examples of the first words that they wanted to change "Sabre" to "Saber" "Wished" to "Wisht" and "Catalogue" to "Catalog". Some of these make sense. The sabre one has always thrown me for a loop. When ever I see it I have to catch my self from thinking it says "sobre" or "saabre" and remind my self that it's "saber".

     There are other examples of changes suggested by the board that would drive an English teacher wild with anger. One of the big ones is that Carnegie himself came out in support of removing the "gh" from the words where that stands in for the "f" sound, like "enough" would be "enuf". The last one would be phonetically correct, but after having years of English teachers pound on you that the first one is correct, the mere sight of the second one is grating to the nerves. At least mine anyway.

     As a child in school, one of the biggest things that got on my nerves was trying to take nouns like the word "moose" and make it plural. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense that you take a word like "goose" and to  make it plural you change it to "geese", but to make "moose" plural you use the same word. Another example is the word "mongoose". You would think that the correct pluralization would be "mongeese", but you would be wrong, the correct plural form of the word is "mongooses".

     Lastly one of the biggest things that drives me nuts about the English language is how we have we can have two words that are spelled the same, but can be pronounced completely differently and mean two entirely different things. One of the best examples of this is "live" and "live". The first one should be pronounced "liv" and the second "live", just in case you couldn't tell. They have completely different meanings, completely different pronunciations, but are spelled completely the same. My wife and I have a 1 year old daughter and it is stuff like this that makes me dread her going to school. It makes me realize that we will receive the dreaded question, "Why?". Which especially bothers me when the only answer I can give is, "Well, it just is."

     The age of the simplified spelling board has come and gone, but there seems to have arisen a new, however very informal, force that is pushing to bring change to the English language: the Internet. It has been interesting to see how many new words are being brought forth every year and added to the great official book of the English language, Webster's dictionary. I remember how it was such a big deal when the word "e-mail" was added, and I love hearing every year when they release the new words that are being added in. Hopefully, along with the adding new words in, we can look back at some of our old ones and try to make them a little less confusing, if not for ourselves, for all of the new English learners out there.


Sources
http://io9.com/5936477/why-cant-we-spell-english-words-phonetically
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board
http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j26/carnegie.php
http://www.rinkworks.com/words/wordforms.shtml
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/08/why-did-english-stop-changing-lets-blame-the-book-of-common-prayer/261589/