English can be a pretty confusing language!
We’ve all learnt about the “rules” of English at school – “i” before “e” except after “c” and the like, but virtually without exception there are exceptions!
It doesn’t make it an easy language to learn.
So for a bit of fun we thought it might be an idea to delve into some of the interesting events and changes that have occurred throughout history that have had an effect on the language we use today – and where some of those little anomalies come from.
- Did you know there are actually ghost words in the dictionary? These are words that mean absolutely nothing! They may have been added years ago and are the result of a printing error – either a misinterpretation, mispronunciation or misreading. One such word is “dord” which was included in the dictionary incorrectly misfiled as a word instead of an abbreviation. The entry existed in more than one printing from 1934 to 1947, and was supposed to be a synonym for density used by physicists and chemists. In fact, one word that is believed to be a misprint that has ended up being adopted into the English language is “tweed”. It should really be tweel, the Scottish word for a type of woven fabric, but due to a printing error, tweel once was misspelled as tweed, and this spelling has stuck and is now universally recognised.
- We all know that English is changing and developing all the time but were you aware that a new word is added to the dictionary every 2 hours?! This means that there are around 4,000 new words every year…the current edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains 615,000 entries.
- Talking of the language developing over time, there was no word in English for the colour orange until about 450 years ago – the name for orange as a fruit came first. What was used to described the colour was “yellow-red”. And orange is one of the few strange words in English that cannot rhyme with any other word, it can only half rhyme or near rhyme.
- Only one letter in every 510 in written English is a “Q”, and if you were to write out the full name of every number (one, two, three, four…), you wouldn’t use a single letter “B” until you reached one billion.
- Have you ever heard of a crutch word? Crutch words are those that we repeat often but have no real meaning or relevance in the sentence… parents of teenagers will know exactly what we mean! It’s the “OMG” and “like” that’s thrown into teenage conversation – but it’s also words like “basically” or “actually” that aren’t necessary within a sentence.
- English is more than just the language most commonly used in the business world globally – it’s the language of the air. In 1951 as civil aviation started to rapidly increase and after a string of aviation accidents, the International Civil Aviation Organisation decided to make communication between pilots and air traffic control as simple as possible by making English the standardised language for all crew across the globe. Not only that, a certain level of proficiency is mandatory too.
- There’s also a very good reason why the English computer keyboard is set out in the “qwerty” format, instead of alphabetical order, which may seem more logical. This dates back to the early typewriters – the keys needed to be arranged in a specialist manner so that the mechanical rods which held the letters did not clash too much and jam. The most commonly used letters couldn’t be placed next to each other, the design of which helped prevent jamming.
What a language! You really do learn something new every day!