avatarGinger Henry Kuenzel

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Humorous language

A Word to the Wise

Say what you mean and mean what you say

Photo by Pisit Heng on Unsplash

Recently someone told me that I was wordy. I was taken aback. What, just because I’ve been known to occasionally turn a five-minute tale into a 20-minute one? But that’s only because I don’t want to leave out any of the important details. No, it turned out that’s not what she meant at all. What she was trying to say was that she admired my ability to always find the right words in any situation.

This got me thinking about how people sometimes say one thing and mean something else. Sometimes these mistakes can be unintentionally insulting, as evidenced by the example above. But other times they are humorous. And they can happen to anyone.

Once, in a travel article, I wrote that the tour group conjugated in the hotel lobby after breakfast. Of course, the word I wanted was congregated. Fortunately, I caught my mistake before sending the article off to my editor. I had a good laugh as I formed a picture in my mind of a crowd of tourists conjugating verbs on flip charts in the lobby before heading out for a day of sightseeing.

I remember when my German husband and I were invited to dinner at a neighbor’s house many years ago. At the time, his English language skills were less than stellar. When our hostess asked him if he wanted a second helping, he responded, “No, I’m fed up.” What he meant was that he was full.

Another time, when he was involved in a fender bender, he said we’d have to take the car to a dentist. We often hear a word and think it means one thing, only to find out that it means something completely different. One of my favorite stories is the time he informed me that there was a problem with the kitchen sink. The water, he said, was walking down the drain. I was puzzled until I understood his logic. Because the sink was clogged, the water wasn’t running down the drain, it was walking.

English can certainly be a confusing language. Normally when you add the prefix ‘in’ to a word, it turns it into the opposite: secure and insecure, or decent and indecent or appropriate and inappropriate. But not always.

Take the word flammable, for example. Add ‘in’ to it and it becomes inflammable, which means the exact same thing as flammable. Another example is valuable and invaluable, both of which have the same meaning.

There are some words that mean the exact opposite of what you would expect — for instance, driveway and parkway. As everyone knows, you park in a driveway and drive on a parkway. And then there are antagonyms, which are words with two meanings that directly contradict each other. An example of this is the word ‘fast,’ which can mean rapid movement — the sprinter was really fast — or fixed in place — the ship was held fast by the anchor. Or consider the word ‘dust.’ When I dust my furniture, I am removing the fine dust particles. But if I dust the cake with powdered sugar, I am adding fine particles of sugar.

The lesson here is that it’s not just foreign languages that are difficult to learn. There’s a lot about our own English language that can leave us scratching our head and turning to the dictionary to look up a word or phrase.

Vocabulary
Language
Words
English Language
Humor
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