~a column by Colleen O’Brien
There are moments in your life when you’re on your own for entertainment — it’s almost like time travel, going back to an era before instant and constant electronics. Getting stuck in traffic can be one of those times. Listening to the radio is fine and the book on tape is compelling, but what if the radio won’t give you your station, the audio book is finished and your I-Fone is on your desk at work? Or if you’re lying awake at night and you can’t get yourself up to make a sandwich or gaze at the moon or you’re too beat to search for the remote or to turn on the lamp to read a book? If you haven’t memorized enough poems or words to songs, what’s to keep you from going bonkers?
I’d say its word games. The English language. It’s an endless source of entertainment, because for one thing, the number of words in the English language is 1,025,109.8. (What is eight-tenths of a word?) This is the estimate by the Global Language Monitor as of January 1, 2014. The English language passed the million word mark on June 10, 2009 at 10:22 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time. (Really? By 10:30 that morning, there were how many more? And how in the world does the electronic wizard program a computer to figure this out?)
I had thought that my language had about a million words, but I wasn’t sure. Now, if I hadn’t been sure before, I can be sure of one thing, there are more than enough opportunities for word play.
When we were little, my sister and I purposefully mispronounced words once we actually figured out how to say them — words such as yacht and depot we first pronounced ya-chet and dee-pot. Then, to be funny, we said them wrong on purpose. I continued the game into adulthood, sometimes making people think I was ill-educated when I’d say fil-im for film or kraw-chet for crochet or that I was speaking a foreign language when I’d say froo-it for fruit.
My younger sister liked to say high-larious for hilarious. Because it reminds me of her, I say it a lot and it makes things even more high-larious, if only to me. She also said a truly hilarious phrase: a pigment of my fig newton rather than a figment of my imagination. I don’t know if this is original to her. I suppose Mrs. Google knows, but I’m not going to ask her because I prefer to think that my sis came up with it.
Once at a Little League game of my son’s, sitting behind a family of Samoans (from the island of Samoa they are, and they are very big, strong, coffee-colored people of serious mien, jolly and friendly once you get to know them), I spotted a beautiful white Russian Samoyed puppy on a leash and blurted out, “Oh! Look at that pretty white Samoan!” The entire family of large, serious-looking people turned around to look at the really red-faced idiot sitting behind them. It’s among my Top 10 embarrassing moments.
My children carry on the habit of giving words a different pronunciation — grockery for grocery, grommet for gourmet, ma-may for mom.
The problem is that any language that will adopt any word from any other language is setting life up for pronunciation problems. Much of the time Americans pronounce a word like it’s pronounced in its mother country — the French word champagne is pronounced sham-pain, both in France and in the U.S. (unless you live in my family, where we say sham-pahg -knee).
When it comes to town names that we copy from elsewhere, however, we seem purposefully to mispronounce. Italy’s Milan (mih-lawn) is Ohio’s My-len. Lima (leee-ma) Peru is pronounced lie-ma in Ohio. Genoa (jen-oh-uh) in Italy is jen-OH-a in Nevada. Not to forget Nevada itself, which is Ne-VA-da in the state, Ne-VAH-da in the Spanish language and Ne-VAY-duh in that little town east of Ames.
If you’re a foreigner learning the American English, what do you do with the word slough? It’s pronounced slew when it’s a swamp but sluff when it’s the snake sloughing off its skin.
From the Dutch, we grabbed the word tattoo, which means the tat-a-tat-tat of taps at a military base. But, from the Tahitian tatau, we also get tattoo, the one that means an ink etching on one’s body.
And there are the words that trick: for example, sometimes I look at the word nowhere (no-where) and read it now here; these mean the exact opposite of each other.
And the words that have two meanings that really are opposite; for example, the word sanguine, means both bloodthirsty AND cheerful. You’d think you could use the word only when discussing the occasional happy murderer. The word trope is, for some reason, an overused word right now, which fits right in because it means overused. But it also means a word or phrase used in a new and different way. I therefore don’t use it at all because I can’t figure out which way to go.
Enough.
Which means, by the way, sufficient to a tolerable degree. Why enough is not spelled enuf is tough. Or why it isn’t pronounced like the slough that is a bog or like though and dough and although is enough to make you cough as you retrieve your I-Fone, having had a thorough dose of word play.
