Everything You Know About English Is Wrong
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I DON’T KNOW HOW ELSE TO TELL YOU THIS… EVERYTHING ABOUT ENGLISH IS EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT ENGLISHIS WRONG. “If you love language and the unvarnished truth, you’ll love Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. You’ll have fun because his lively, comedic, skeptical voice will speak to you from the pages of his word-bethumped book.” —Richard Lederer, author of Anguished English, Get Thee to a Punnery, and Word Wizard ow that you know, it’s time to, well, bite the mother tongue. Bill Brohaugh, former editor of Writer’s Digest, will be your tour guide on this delightfulN journey through the English language. Tackling words, letters, YOU grammar, and rules, no sacred cow remains untipped as Brohaugh reveals such KNOW fascinating and irreverent shockers as: • If you figuratively climb the walls, you are agitated/frustrated/crazy. If you literally climb the walls, you are Spider-Man. • The word “queue” is the poster child of an English spelling rule so dominant we’ll call it a dominatrix rule: “U must follow Q! Slave!” • So much of our vocabulary comes from the classical languages— clearly, Greece, and not Grease, is the word, is the word, is the word. • Emoticons: Unpleasant punctuational predictions. This book guarantees you’ll never look at the English language the same way again—if you write, read, or speak it, it just ain’t possible to live without this tell- all guide. (“Ain’t,” incidentally, is not a bad word.) “Better plotted than a glossary, more riveting than a thesaurus, more filmable than a Harry Potter index—and that’s just Brohaugh’s footsnorts... I mean, feetsnotes...um feetsneets?...good gravy I’m glad I’m just a cartoonist.” —John Caldwell, one of Mad magazine’s Usual Gang of Idiots WRONG BILL BROHAUGH is the former editor of Writer’s Digest magazine and the former editorial director of Writer’s Digest Books. He is the author of Unfortunate English and Professional Etiquette for Writers, and is the director of English through the Ages. He lives in Amelia, Ohio. Why English ain’t Writing Reference from England, $12.95 U.S./$15.50 CAN/£6.99 UK and “ain’t” ISBN-13: 978-14022-1135-5 www.sourcebooks.com ISBN-10: 1-4022-1135-X BROHAUGH ain’t a bad word UPC EAN EverythingYouKnowAboutEnglish_int.qxp:Between You _ I internals.qxd 4/2/08 5:15 PM Page i EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT ENGLISH IS WRONG Why English ain’t from England, and “ain’t” ain’t a bad word BILL BROHAUGH Elbarskhan & mmh EverythingYouKnowAboutEnglish_int.qxp:Between You _ I internals.qxd 4/2/08 5:06 PM Page ii Copyright © 2008 by William Brohaugh Cover and internal design © 2008 by Sourcebooks, Inc. Front cover design by Nu-Image Design Cover photo by Nu-Image Design Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including informa- tion storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quota- tions embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional service. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.—From a Declaration of Principles Jointly Adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations All brand names and product names used in this book are trade- marks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor in this book. Published by Sourcebooks, Inc. P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410 (630) 961-3900 Fax: (630) 961-2168 www.sourcebooks.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brohaugh, William. Everything you know about English is wrong / by Bill Brohaugh. p. cm. 978-1-4022-1927-6 1. English language—Etymology. 2. English language—History. 3. English language—Terms and phrases. 4. English language— Usage. I. Title. PE1574.B63 2006 422—dc22 2007046889 Printed and bound in the United States of America. BG 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Elbarskhan & mmh EverythingYouKnowAboutEnglish_int.qxp:Between You _ I internals.qxd 4/2/08 5:06 PM Page iii Dedication Howz mom ’n’m? Thank you, Gary Burbank, for giving radio voice these past twenty years to my wackiest thoughts. I am honored and thrilled on those occasions when I can make you laugh, sir—because you have made me laugh so much harder. And given that The Gary Burbank Show is a community, I’m honored to also bow graciously to Burbank writers who have become more than challenging colleagues, but also fast friends, in alphabetical order ranked according to their smell: John Bunyan, Tim Mizak, Jim Probasco, Mary Tom Watts, Kevin Wolfe. I must be off. Elbarskhan & mmh EverythingYouKnowAboutEnglish_int.qxp:Between You _ I internals.qxd 4/2/08 5:06 PM Page iv Elbarskhan & mmh EverythingYouKnowAboutEnglish_int.qxp:Between You _ I internals.qxd 4/2/08 5:06 PM Page v Acknowledgments My gratitude to • Jack Heffron for his first recognition of this book’s possibilities • Annie Sisson for not questioning why her husband kept chortling fervently at the keyboard at odd hours of the night • Sandra Bond for laughing at mostly the right times (at the book, anyway) and subsequently selling the book anyway • Dennis Chaptman for friendship and for challenging me to surreal- istic humor extremes with his own surrealism • Shakespeare for spelling it theat er and to me for getting out of the theater biz just in time • Mad magazine and, independently, Jay Ward of Rocky and Bullwinkle fame, for perhaps shaping my preadolescent sense of humor too damn much, as well as Richard Armour (and mostly Richard Armour) and the style of written humor that tickled and propelled me at an impressionable age (who else could demon- strate that footnotes could be rollickingly funny?) • And, oh yeah, to Green Acres. I suspect I may be the first to thank Green Acres in a book’s front matter, but as far as humor goes, Green Acres is the place to be. Elbarskhan & mmh EverythingYouKnowAboutEnglish_int.qxp:Between You _ I internals.qxd 4/2/08 5:06 PM Page vi Elbarskhan & mmh EverythingYouKnowAboutEnglish_int.qxp:Between You _ I internals.qxd 4/2/08 5:06 PM Page vii Introduction “The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.” —Derek Walcott Never trust a bookstore employee who, when asked where to find etymology and word books, leads you to the word-search puzzle rack. In the true story that prompted this advice, I stared at the pulp- paper acrostics and cryptograms and crosswords. Though a bit flummoxed, I realized that I should forgive this earnest associate. After all, English itself is, in a broad sense, a word puzzle, and like both those puzzles and the queries of where the etymology section of the bookstore is, sometimes people try hard yet come up with wrong answers. Our understanding of English—its history, its rules, its use—is often misconceived, misguided, misinformed, or based on some lie someone told us, probably via email, cuz it made a good story. Yet, what a wondrous language. Puzzle me this language always, despite its inherent confounderies. Yes, English is Swiss1-cheesed with pitfalls, almost all of our own fermenting. Yes, there are 512.6 ways to pronounce the letter 1 Oddly appropriate since the Swiss don’t have a language of their own. Elbarskhan & mmh EverythingYouKnowAboutEnglish_int.qxp:Between You _ I internals.qxd 4/2/08 5:06 PM Page viii viii Bill Brohaugh combination o-u-g-h from through to tough to cough to plough to flough to Brohough (a branch of my family). Yes, English is known kto khave kmore kpotential ksilent kletters kthan kactual kones. Yes, we confuse our own spelling by respecting the languages we borrow from to the point of retaining both original spelling and pronunciation2 (for example, we spell rendezvous and say ron-day- voo but we don’t write rondayvu or say wren-dees-vows). Yes, the whole language is, in modern terms, a “mash-up” that allows slang words like mash-up and slang to not only enter the language but also become living, vibrant vocabulary. Yes, English is distended with exceptions, oddities, antiquities, fossils, distractions, oxymorons, shifts, speed bumps, flipflops, flummeries, and words with there homonym3 disasters. And, yes yes yes, everything you know about English is wrong because of all the above. Yet, all these negative yeses reflecting the influences, the excep- tions, the what-the-hells-do-those-words-mean (not to mention the fact that I can create odd plural words like “what-the-hells-do-those- words-mean”)—all these negative yeses bring to our language a flex- ibility, a luxuriant breeding ground for poetry, the foundation of spelling bees, and (most important to this book) a dizzyingly high platform for argument both fun and intense. Everything You Know About English Is Wrong makes no attempt to settle the arguments, and, in fact, (warning, verb use of advocate lurking) I devil’s-advocate occasionally purely to spur arguments. On these pages, I regularly cross the line between descriptivism (“Hey, grammar is as grammar does”) and prescriptivism (“Conjugate prop- erly or I’ll rap your knuckles with a ruler, child!”).