InDepthNH.org (https://indepthnh.org/author/michael-ferber/)
We often hear about “silent e,” that magical letter that turns a can into a cane or a glob into a globe, as Tom Lehrer put it in his charming song for the Electric Company many years ago, but a greater problem for English spelling is a large set of silent consonants.
Given the many thousands of languages spoken today, and records of hundreds of extinct ones, do we have enough evidence to reconstruct “Proto-World,” the ancestor of all natural languages?
Why is our week composed of seven days and not, say, five days or ten? The ancient Hebrew answer is that God spent six days creating heaven, the earth, and all living things, and then rested on the seventh day, the Sabbath.
So keep reading translations, if you like poetry, and don’t worry too much about what you are missing. You’re not missing everything, and if some things get lost other things get found.
If my title leads you to hope this column is about amusing things in English, such as funny words like “hornswoggle” and “discombobulate,” I’m afraid I’ll disappoint you.
Take climate change, for example. Frank Luntz, a Republican operative who specializes in misleading phrases, recommended to George W. Bush that his administration use that phrase instead of the more honest global warming.
More and more writers and publishers are joining newspaper editors in the belief that the second-last item in a series needs no comma after it.
Some friends and I, with too much time on our hands, have long been collecting examples of such expressions, which we call “autonyms.”
Well, all right, there are a few ideas, based on a few facts, but they don’t amount to an explanation, not yet anyway.