Road Apples by Tim Sanders
July 11, 2011
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Parsing words As Churchill once said: “The English language is a riddle inside a conundrum, wrapped in a tasty sesame seed bun with slices of enigma added for flavor.” Okay, so that may not be an exact quote, but I’m almost positive it was Winston Churchill who said it. If former Vice President Dan Quayle had said it, he would have thrown the “potatoe” metaphor in there somewhere, just for style. Which naturally leads to a recent news story sent to me by former Centre resident Mike Minnix. The story, from the Houston Chronicle, told of the June 25 death of George C. Ballas, Sr., inventor of the Weed Eater. The Ballas death inspired Mike ... by which I mean it inspired him to ponder the following English language conundrum he discovered, wrapped in a weed eater: “His invention is a marvelous lawn care tool, but the name poses a problem for Southerners. What is the past tense of ‘weed eat?’ If I have just finished using Mr. Ballas’ invention around my barn, would I state ‘I have done weed-eated?’ ‘Weed et?’ Your expertise is clearly needed.” ‘My expertise?” I liked the sound of that, so I acted like I’d always imagined a person with expertise would act and got me a cup of coffee. Then I set to work applying my expertise to the problem. I knew the solution was in the term “weed eater,” which ended in an “-r.” All I had to do was find some other nouns that ended in “-r” and go from there. It was all simple logic, and when it comes to simple logic, mine is as simple as anybody’s. Here’s what I came up with: • RIDGE RUNNER INCORRECT: Yesterday I done ridge run. CORRECT: Yesterday I done run ridges. • MOONSHINER INCORRECT: Yesterday I done moon shined. CORRECT: Yesterday I done shined moon. • CAT BURGLAR INCORRECT: Yesterday I done cat burgled. CORRECT: Yesterday I done burgled me some cats. That made sense to me. If a ridge runner runs ridges, a moonshiner shines moons, and a cat burglar burgles cats, then obviously a weed eater eats weeds, and you only have to reverse the words “weed” and “eat” to construct the past tense version of “weed eat.” As in: • WEED EATER INCORRECT: Yesterday I done weed et. CORRECT: Yesterday I done et weeds. This seemed logical, but it left the impression that the weeds out near the barn had been eaten by Mike, not by his weed eater. I tried several other strategies, but none of them worked. I finally was forced to send him a message which suggested that a real Southerner with a barn should get himself a goat, and make the whole past tense problem moot. Or mooter. My thinking was: • EARL “THE WEED EATER” GOAT CORRECT: Yesterday Earl he done et all them weeds out by the barn and also et the wicker seat out of our porch chair. That was my answer, and I thought it showed that anyone, if he applied logic, could unravel those pesky English language conundrums covered in enigma sprouts, wrapped in mystery and garlic bread. But of course I was wrong. I realized how wrong I was when an old college buddy, Larry Spickler (he comes from a long line of Spicklers who spickled throughout Western Europe in the 1800s) forwarded an email about how the English language is definitely not logical. Among other things, the email listed several words which are spelled the same but have altogether different meanings. There are hundreds of them in our language; words like: “dove, row, invalid, wound, sewer, bass” and if you live in the South, “goober, peckerwood, piddlin’ and toboggan.” And don’t think I don’t know what those words are called; I do. I have expertise. They are called “heterogeneous thyroids” and have always made me wonder why it was that if something needed a name, an altogether new word wasn’t created rather than recycling one already in use? For example, when somebody was naming the familiar punctuation mark consisting of two dots, one above the other, why did he decide to give it the name already assigned to the lower part of the digestive tract, which is often preceded by the word “spastic?” Another section in that aggravating email asked “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, two geese. So one moose, two meese? [mouse, mice, louse, lice, grouse, grice, house, hice, etc.] ... If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?” etc. etc. etc. And as if those kinds of anomalies weren’t enough to confuse new immigrants trying to learn English, how about those idiotic combinations of words called “oxymorons?” Phrases like “jumbo shrimp, virtual reality, and Microsoft Works” come to mind. I recently saw a pair of living, breathing oxymorons in a department store. They were a couple of skinny guys wearing black knit “toboggans” pulled down over their ears– in July, no less. To complete the Beavis and Butthead look, they also wore what modern fashion designers call “long shorts.” These two geniuses appeared to be in their twenties, and they looked as though they’d purchased their wardrobes from the Man Mountain Dean and Haystack Calhoun collection. If the “shorts,” which hung loosely from the waist to an inch or two north of the ankles, had been silk, there was enough material there to make a serviceable parachute. Come to think of it, not only is there little or no sense to the English language, there’s also little or no sense to a large percentage of the people who try to use it. |