Damned English

A language can be a fiend. That's what the French think of theirs; but the English think so of theirs too. I'll deal with French soon, but I had to tackle the English fiend during my recent visit to France. The children in the home where I stayed all study English at school and the two older ones had spent a couple of weeks in England to improve their spoken skills. Well, it's not an easy task and I gladly offered to let them make all the mistakes they wanted. But it was fun too; or should I say also. The two children had too much trouble figuring out who to talk to, and that two too nice children, one of whom wore a tou-tou at ballet classes, soon found out that English has too many words that sound the same, are spelt differently, and mean different things.

A friend just reminded me how even after years of speaking the language we can fall found of some silly errors. She was sick and the chicken pox spots were all over her body: "legions are now drying up...", she wrote and I had visions of shrivelling soldiers lying on her body. She meant lesions. It's rare that a 'g' and an 's' give the same sound, but there you go.

But English has a lot of these 'false friends': plum (fruit), plum (desirable), plumb (lead weight for accurate vertical measurement)--that hanging plum plum's hanging plumb; right (side), right (correct, straight), wright (skilled worker), rite (kind of ceremony)--the rite is to go to the wright's right, right. And many more.

After a quarter hour of playing with some of these words, my French students of English were worn out. C'est tout. They said.