Amusing English

As the semester comes to a close, many students, professors, and members of the staff express fatigue. One of my colleagues said she felt "overwhelmed," and then she added, "Does anyone ever just feel 'whelmed'?"

I'm reluctant to claim that English is stranger than other languages when it comes to oddities such as the one my colleague pointed out. I've studied Spanish, Swedish, German, and a smattering of Latin and French, however, and those language do seem more regular in the way they "manufacture"--and spell--words; and English is notorious for being more extraordinarily inclusive--some might claim cannibalistic--than other languages. With regard to the sheer number of words Brits, Canadians, and Americans use, for example, English is much bigger than German. If I am recalling correctly what a German teacher once told us, German has a working vocabulary of about 60,000 words, whereas that of English may be twice as large. (And now, of course, I will need to check these pseudo-factoids, after I finish the post.) When I was in Sweden, some Swedes were about as proud as Swedes ever get about the fact that their word, "ombudsperson," had been devoured by English. (In Sweden, it's unseemly to appear proud of anything; celebrities and others from the U.S. should be sent there to detoxify the ego.) Only about 8 million people have Swedish as a first language, so other languages tend not to borrow much from Swedish.

Sometimes in class when we touch on how difficult English must be to learn as a second or third language, I mention the words "enough," "bough," "through," "threw," and "thorough" and suggest how just these five words would raise enormous difficulties for a new student of English.

In any case, my colleague's comment got me to thinking about other oddities:

1. If someone can be "feckless," can someone else be "feckful"? Apparently not. "Feck," according to the OED online, shares roots with "effect" and "effective," it seems. How about "fecky" or "feckie"? (And don't you love Stephen Colbert's coinage, "truthiness"?)

2. The same goes for "ruthless" versus "ruthful." If "ruthless" is a pejorative adjective, wouldn't "ruthful" be an honorific one?

3. Is the opposite of "exhausted" "inhausted"? As if! How about just "hausted"?

4. Sometimes I am precipitous in my actions. When I am excessively cautious, should I be described as "postcipitious"? Or maybe I'd just be late in that case.

5. When I feel as if I should express thanks, I am "grateful." When I feel the opposite, I don't think of myself as "grateless." And shouldn't "grateful" really mean "full of the capacity to scrape"?

6. Most people, not just English teachers, know how useless the word "incredible" now is. When people say "that's incredible," they don't mean that the thing is not believable; they do mean that the thing is good, but "incredible" is used so frequently that it doesn't even mean that anymore. It just seems like a worn-out word. Maybe we should say "That's ultra-credible" instead. It's funny that saying "That's credible" really isn't much of a compliment. It seems to imply something like "Well, it sounds as if you're telling the truth for once."

7. I like the word "discombobulated." I always have. However, one cannot be "combublated," apparently, or even "bobulated." ("Oh, man, I got so bobulated last night!") And how did "bob" get in there? Was the word originally "discomrobertulated"?

I hope your day has been just right--combobulated in just the ways you like it to be.