Fun: English is Hilarious / Brilliant

English-absolutely hilarious/brilliant!

 We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?

  

Then one may be that, and there would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim!

Let's face it - English is a crazy language.
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;
Neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
English muffins weren't invented in England.

We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes,
We find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square,
And a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write, but fingers don't fing,
Grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham?

Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend?
If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them,
What do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?

Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English

Should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.
In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital?

We ship by truck but send cargo by ship...
We have noses that run and feet that smell.
We park in a driveway and drive in a parkway.
And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same,
While a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language
In which your house can burn up as it burns down,
In which you fill in a form by filling it out,
And in which an alarm goes off by going on.

And in closing..........

If Father is Pop, how come Mother's not Mop.???

Fun: Alliterative Absurdities

Alliterative Absurdities

This comic poem originally appeared in the anthology Such Nonsense! edited by Carolyn Wells (1918). Try reading the poem aloud to appreciate the apt alliterations of the anonymous author.

If you caught a captious curate killing kippers for the cook,
In the cloisters with a club yclept¹ a cleek²,
Would you say he was as wily
As a cunning crocodily
Catching cockles with a corkscrew in a creek?

If you beheld a battleboat bombarding Biscay Bay
While the big guns bellowed bold from brazen throat,
Would you say it was as funny
As a bouncing blue-backed bunny
Blowing bubbles with a bobby in a boat?

If you saw a driveling dreamer drowning ducklings in a ditch,
And deducting data dry as dust to see,
Would you say that this death-dealer
Was of ducks and drakes a stealer,
Or of Darwin's dead ideas a devotee?

¹ An old-fashioned word meaning "called" or "named"
² A hook or golf club

 Source: http://grammar.about.com/od/rhetoricstyle/a/Alliterative-Absurdities.htm

Humour: Embarassing Misunderstanding

Hi!

This newsclip from the STAR dated 8 May 2010 is a true account of embarassing experiences that a lady had while she was holidaying in Beijing, China.

The incidents showed that miscommunication still happens across cultures when English is spoken inaccurately or when a listener had misheard a sentence or a phrase.

Enjoy!

Rodney

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Click on the news cutting to enlarge it life size

Humour: Teaching of Maths & Science in English (the Malaysian Experience in Cartoons)

Dear All,

These cartoons were taken from a local Malay daily, Utusan Malaysia which poked fun at the attempts of teachers to speak English in their Maths and Science lessons or people who use Manglish in their everyday interactions

The toons would be fully understood by Malaysian teachers or those who could understand the Malay language or Malaysian English (Manglish).

Enjoy!   :-)

Rodney Tan
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Source: Utusan Malaysia