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LANGUAGE HUMOR AT ITS FINEST
Making yourself more proficient in English need not be a drag. You can actually speed up the learning process and make it fun by generously lacing it with humor—but preferably the best that the English language can offer.
In this new section, apart from giving a fixed slot to our weekly “In a Lighter Vein” pop-out humor piece in the Forum homepage, we have put together the finest of those weekly humor pop-ups since the Forum started. The best of them—collected from various sources on the web and sent in by friends—are all here, posted in the Forum under the following headings: Wordplay, On the Job, Student and School Life, and Miscellany.
So if you missed any of the best of the Forum’s weekly humor pop-ups, you can enjoy and savor them again and again here—and better still, share them with your friends!
Click here to go to the board (requires registration to post)
Our Crazy Language—Why Does English Behave the Way It Does?
Did you know that “verb” is a noun?
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How can you look up words in a dictionary if you can’t spell them?
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If a word is misspelled in a dictionary, how would we ever know?
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If two mouses are “mice” and two louses are “lice,” why aren’t two houses “hice”?
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If Webster wrote the first dictionary, where did he find the words?
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If you wrote a letter, perhaps you bote your tongue?
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If you’ve read a book, you can reread it. But wouldn’t this also mean that you would have to “member” somebody in order to remember them?
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In Chinese, why are the words for “crisis” and “opportunity” the same?
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Is it a coincidence that the only 15-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is “uncopyrightable”?
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Is there another word for a synonym?
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Shouldn’t there be a shorter word for “monosyllabic”?
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What is another word for “thesaurus”?
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Where do swear words come from?
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Why can’t you make another word using all the letters in “anagram”?
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Why do “fat chance” and “slim chance” mean the same thing?
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Why do “overlook” and “oversee” mean opposite things?
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Why do people use the word “irregardless”?
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Why do some people type “cool” as “kewl?”
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Why do we say something is “out of whack”? What is a “whack”?
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Why do we say something’s “out of order” when it’s broken but we never say “in of order” when it works?
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Why does “cleave” mean both split apart and stick together?
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Why does “slow down” and “slow up” mean the same thing?
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Why does “flammable” and “inflammable” mean the same thing?
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Why does the Chinese ideogram for “trouble” symbolize two women living under one roof?
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Why does X stand for a kiss and O stand for a hug?
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Why doesn’t “onomatopoeia” sound like what it is?
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Why don’t we say “why” instead of “how come”?
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Why is “crazy man” an insult, while to insert a comma and say “Crazy, man!” is a compliment?
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Why are a “wise man” and a “wise guy” opposites?
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Why is “abbreviation” such a long word?
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Why is “dyslexic” so hard to spell?
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Why is it so hard to remember how to spell MNEMONIC?
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Why is it that no word in the English language rhymes with “month,” “orange,” “silver,” or “purple”?
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Why is it that we “recite” at a play and “play” at a recital?
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Why is it that writers “write” but fingers don’t “fing,” grocers don’t “groce” and hammers don’t “ham”?
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Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?
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Why is the plural of “goose” – “geese,” and why isn’t the plural of “moose” – “meese”?
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Why isn’t “palindrome” spelled the same way backwards?
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Why isn’t “phonetic” spelled the way it sounds?
—From “Therapeutic Humor with Dr. Steve,” HumorMatters.com
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Go to Miscellany now!
