Niche: General (Language and Communication)
Odinakaeze Chinonye P.
HUMOUR THE QUEEN’S LANGUAGE.
Communication has been defined as the process of sharing ideas, information, and messages with others in a particular time and place. Communication forms include verbal communication (writing and talking), as well as nonverbal communication (such as facial expressions, body language, or gestures), visual communication (the use of images or pictures, such as painting, photography, video, or film), and electronic communication (telephone calls, electronic mail, cable television, or satellite broadcasts). Of all forms, the verbal form is certified as the most developed and effective and the English language said to be the primary language of a majority of people across the universe has been described as ‘possessing extensive beauty and power’. What is hardly referred to is the chaotic nature of the language.
A writer once described English as a language which claims to be rule governed but refuses to stick to its own rules. I found it quite interesting that someone else shared my opinion on the same language and like me, was asking the same question; ‘why would anybody, (me inclusive), bother with learning a language with such ambiguities?’
I think that if any child is told that the word he loves most in the world, mummy, refers to a preserved, embalmed corpse, he would opt out from using the word. What’s great about a language in which words are eaten, proposals stick in the throat, a horse eats its own head off, people make heads and tails of issues, men are old sticks-in-the-mud, smiles are given but never taken and babies are born with silver spoons in their mouths which has got nothing to do with silver or spoons at all?
When you move along, move up or move down, it’d be funny to realize you are moving in a particular and similar direction. A milk maid in the English world is one who milks cows; a milk man sells milk while the cow which produces the milk refuses to be a milk cow. She prefers to be called a ‘milch cow’; and a milk sod refers to a man who in reality, has got no business with milk. You would also be quite surprised to find out that pot holes are not pots with holes in them, that quicksand is quite slow and that a slow worm actually moves quickly. It’s not even a worm.
A truck is a lorry for moving GOODS and GOODS are moveable properties but having no truck with me won’t mean ‘that your truck is not with me’ and a pretty girl is referred to as a pretty little piece of goods.
What is sensible in the fact that ‘it rains cats and dogs’? ‘Misfortunes rain and pour’? People are given ‘a place in the sun’ which won’t imply sitting or being in the sun anyway? Or ‘that one kicks the bucket when one dies’? Where else do people build houses with ‘enough room to swing a cat’; house owners don’t just ‘let the cat out of the bag’ (you’d be surprised they don’t even own cats), they also ‘live cat and dog lives’? If a house burglar burgles houses, why won’t a cat burglar burgle cats at that? The English male is a ‘he’; hence a he-goat is a male goat, a he-man (not a male man though) is a strong man. Why the language refuses to derive he-dogs, he-sheep, he-lions et al is beyond comprehension.
Where was I taught that ‘pro’ is the opposite of ‘con’? What I was not taught, though, is why a con-man does not have the ‘pro-man’ version. Besides, shouldn’t persons who desire progress refrain from attending any congress?
Perhaps, the late novelist, John Steinbeck did know better. For in his own words, ‘when it comes right down to it, nothing has changed. The English sentence is just as difficult to write as it ever was’.
He could not have been any more right.
