Chase

Feel free to add your own trivia about the English language, ASL, or SEE. Make comments on language trivia or ask questions.

1. Know what a “palindrome” is? It’s a sentence, phrase, or word that reads backward the same as it does forward.

These are some palindromic names and words fun to finger-spell:

bob . . . civic . . . did . . . hannah . . . kayak . . . level . . . madam

Deafness

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BelleSorrisa

2. "Underground" is the only word in the English language that begins and ends with the letters "und."

Canuckian_Chick

grrr... gotta get my thinking caps back on... can't think before my cup of coffee.. be right back... grrr... be right back...

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Chase

What a great word for finger-spelling practice. I like the way you get to snap from u to n twice.



3. Only two words in the English language have all five vowels in order:

abstemious . . . facetious

Tousi

1. a. There's MOM, DAD, and (sorry bro), SIS

Matilda

4. The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is -

pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis .... *whew*

Chase

Forty-five letters! And I thought antidisestablishmentarianism with 28 was long.

Matilda

For those who want to know what this word means Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, "a factitious word alleged to mean 'a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust found in volcanoes'."

Matilda

5. No word in English language rhymes with: ... month ... silver ... purple ... orange

Chase

6. "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" contains every letter in the standard English alphabet.

Matilda

That never dawned on me ... the sentence is familiar with me when I learned to type at High School.

jillio

So did I! We had to learn to spell it in the 3rd grade!

Chase

7. Came across these common gripes on-line: Stupid English teachers make English too hard. It’s all crazy with no rhyme or reason: There’s no egg in an eggplant and can’t find a bit of eggs in an eggroll . . . Hamburger is made of beef, not ham . . . Why is it the same when your house burned up or burned down? Sheese, why?

It's all in the trivia:

a. English teachers don’t make up the language or its rules. People have produced both over several centuries through talking and writing. Good English teachers explain it; great English teachers inspire it's use.

b. The fruit of an eggplant is ovoid. That means in the shape of an egg. Duh. Egg roll (two words, not one) is a translation of a Chinese dish wrapped in a thin pancake made mostly from eggs and water. Double duh! They could have called it "water roll," but that would upset as many complainers.

c. English is a pot of many languages. Hamburger is a German term meaning “from Hamburg” (a German city). In that city, they were known for grinding meat and making patties of it. The name has nothing to do with the type of meat. The same is true of frankfurters. In Frankfurt (another German city) lots of butchers prepared ground meat in sections of tubes (don't ask what they used for the tubes).

d. Actually, correct English is “Your house burned.” Period. Adding an unnecessary preposition to the end of a phrase is poor grammar, so again, don’t blame English teachers.

It’s like “Where are going to?” should be simply “Where are you going?”

“That’s where it’s at” would more correctly be “That’s where it is.”

Buffalo

8. I thought 'Smiles' is the longest word -- it is a mile between those two S's. J/K

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Chase

S-mile-S. Good wordplay, Buffalo. What this thread's all about.

9. Speaking of buffalo, you know of course the American buffalo was misnamed by the English speakers who first saw them. The animal is really a bison, but the closest animal in the experience of those reporting on the New World was the African and Asion buffalo.

a. Same with the American Indian. Oops! We really aren't in India after all.

b. Ditto the American antelope. It's really a unique species, fastest animal in the North America . . . the pronghorn.

c. The elk in America are not the same critter in Europe. A better name is the native one, wapiti. I'm sure others know many similar goofs from all over.

Matilda

d. We hear of people coming from "up north" or "down south", but never "left west" or "right east".

e. Boxing rings are not shaped like a ring at all. They're square!

f. Pineapples does not contain pine or apples.

g. "Slim chance" and "fat chance" mean the same.

h. "Flammable" and "Inflammable" mean the same.

i. Why not "teethbrush"?

If "mice" is the plural form of "mouse", why isn't "hice" the plural of "house"?

If "geese" is the plural form of "goose", why isn't "meese" the plural of "moose"?

Chase

Your continuation of the list of English anomalies is great, but at least here in the U.S., some people who think of geography as a flat page have begun to say "left coast" for California, Oregon, and Washington and "right coast" for our eastern seaboard.

10. English history trivia (Great Britain): In very broad strokes, from 1066 to the 1300s, Old English was an underground language spoken by outlaws and subsequently suffered two and a half centuries of change. Chaucer’s Middle English of the 1300s became Shakespeare’s Modern English in the early 1600s.

Only then did Cawdrey’s Dictionary of 1604 attempt to codify the variations of spelling, punctuation and grammar so wide that English speakers from one end of Great Britain could sometimes barely understand the writing of those who supposedly spoke the same language at the other end.

By 1755, Johnson’s English Dictionary had completed the job, and written English of the U.K. was fairly standard. The Oxford English Dictionary of 1884 to present continues the U.K. tradition.

dreamchaser

[quote=Chase;960366]Very interesting Weed Hopper

Reba

We say "out West" and "back East". I think that reflects the pioneer days when Americans left the East coast to migrate to the West.

Reba

I say "Left Coast" to refer to the political leanings of those states.

dreamchaser

LOL at Rheba,,,tooooo cute!

DragonYoga

Count FL in - too damn many yanks live here!

Find one person whose family has been here for more than a generation, and it's a shock!

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VamPyroX

And... East often refers to those from Asia.

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DragonYoga

pretty vague, I admit.

Where I live, we say "west/east coast" to mean US, "far East" to mean Asia... *shrug*

*gobbling a cup of Wendy's chocolate frosty* MMMM

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Chase

11. While the British struggled to order a language many thought crude and barbaric, the American colonies in the mid-1700s progressively rejected anything British, including the language. Only by a narrow margin was English selected as the official language of the states over German. The spelling, punctuation, and grammar here were notoriously chaotic.

Noah Webster was a veteran of the Revolutionary War and proudly patriotic. For example, his dictionary purged the “u” from colour and honour and changed around the final letters in centre and theatre. He also wanted thru instead of through and tung rather than tongue, but many of his changes were rejected by patrons.

However, the dictionary and grammar guide which emerged simplified the rules and satisfied publishers, though many Tory-minded schools were slow to teach the differences. Today, all major U.S. publications and the majority of publishers in Canada use the “American” system for over 75% of the world’s commercial printed matter.

Matilda

The dot over the letter i is called a "tittle".

315 entries in Webster's 1996 Dictionary were misspelled.

The original name for the butterfly was ‘flutterby’.

A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.

Rulership by words is called logocracy.