Why English Is a Hot Mess (And Why That Makes It Amazing)

Plus a fiendishly hard quiz to pillage for your next trivia night, and reading recommendations for those who might want to chase English down its many rabbit holes. 

(Oh! did we mention the footnotes?)

Most of us who grew up in English never notice how chaotic it is until we have to explain something to someone who didn't. How many native speakers can say why the plural of 'goose' is 'geese' but two or more 'moose' is not 'meese'  (and not even 'mooses,' for that matter)?¹ And who among us can say why a phrase like "an adorable tiny three-legged rescue dog" sounds fine, but "a three-legged tiny rescue adorable dog" makes us feel like we're having an aneurysm?²

English is, quite simply, the most gloriously inconsistent language on earth. Its rules contradict each other, its exceptions outnumber its rules, and its history is a patchwork quilt stitched by conquerors, scholars, bureaucrats, poets, and the occasional misprint. And yet, that very chaos is the source of its unruly beauty.

I love the English language. So much so that I've spent a good chunk of my working life trying to coax, cajole, and strongarm it into what I hope are amusing configurations. But I am the first to admit that there is a certain masochistic tinge to my love of the mother tongue. Compared to most other languages, English is unnecessarily complicated and gleefully cavalier about its own inconsistencies. Moreover, many of the formal and stylistic rules that we are taught in school are bizarrely based on those of Latin--a language it does not resemble in the least, so that no one who actually speaks English in everyday life pays them any mind.³ There are so many exceptions to almost every rule in English that they are hardly worth the label: 'i' before 'e' except after 'c'? Weird.

But I love English exactly because it is chaotic. For one thing, English is voracious. It swallows words from other languages whole and spits them out as if they were its own. Yet, that indiscriminate stealing gives it a great deal of its beauty. There's a real egalitarianism in the way words derived from Anglo-Saxon, ancient Latin and Greek, German, Algonquian, Urdu, and any number of other languages fit comfortably--sometimes arrestingly--side by side in a single sentence. But its amoeba-like ability to absorb words from other languages has made it unwieldy. English has an estimated one million words. By comparison, German has somewhere in the vicinity of 185,000 words. French and Spanish, around 100,000 each. Its massive vocabulary makes it capable of incredible nuance, but also susceptible to grandiloquence, hairsplitting pedantry, and run-of-the-mill miscommunication. 

Yet for all its head-clutching aggravations, writers like Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Doris Lessing, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Jane Austen, Raymond Chandler, Don Delillo, Ted Chiang, Toni Morrison, Anne Carson, Ocean Vuong, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Carl Phillips, and oh, that Shakespeare guy⁴ have used it to construct distinct and distinctive voices for themselves and in so doing have given the world some its most stunning evocations of the human condition.

So yes, English is a hot mess. But how well do you actually know its oddities, inconsistencies, and delightful little gremlins? Time to test your linguistic mettle. Let us know how you did in the comments. All answers have explanations, so the next time you're stuck in an elevator, you can not only trot out some fun trivia, but you can give your rapt audience a full run down on it. Enjoy!

G.B. Shaw said in English you can spell 'fish' G-H-O-T-I, and he's right. Why is English so stubbornly inconsistent and just plain weird? Why is 'through' pronounced 'thru,' but 'tough' pronounced 'tuff'? Why is it considered ungrammatical to split infinitives when even the most erudite among us do it on the daily (SPOILER ALERT: It's not, except by pedants and waterheads) How has English resisted all efforts to make it make sense for so long? Below are some books that try to unravel the mystery of English, or failing that, revel in its oddness.

Disclaimer

If you've been thinking about learning English, do not let any of the above scare you off! It's not nearly as hard as I make it sound, and HCPL has classes and resources to help you. ESL Closses at HCPL>>

Footnotes

¹This is directly related to English's tendency to borrow words from other languages. Goose is an Old English word that denotes plural with the vowel sound change. You see the exact same construction in foot/feet and tooth/teeth. Moose, on the other hand, is a much later arrival in English, taken from the Native American Algonquian language. By the time moose came along, most plural formations had changed to the more common 's' of 'es' endings. Now, you might rightly ask, "Then why isn't the plural 'mooses"? It's because as a loanword from Algonquian, it retained its original plural formation. Algonguian did not add an 's' to form plurals, and no English speakers bothered to add one.

²There's a rule for ordering multiple adjectives. They follow a specific hierarchy: Opinion, Size, Age, Shape, Color, Origin, Material, and Purpose. This order helps English speakers naturally structure descriptive words. You might say, "I've never heard of this rule, and I've been speaking English all my life!" The fascinating thing is that native speakers do it naturally. We are never taught this hierarchy. The rule isn't taught in Language Arts. We just do it naturally. 

³If you were ever taught that you shouldn't split infinitives or end a sentence with a preposition in English class, you can blame a bunch of 18th-century self-appointed experts who insisted English, a Germanic language, should follow the rules of classical Latin--a decidedly non-Germanic language. It made no sense then, and it makes no sense now. Fortunately, the experts have been roundly ignored except by pedants and grammar snobs. If we had listened to them, we would have cringeworthy constructions like "to go boldly" instead of the more logical and cadenced "to boldly go where no [human] has gone before.'  Bonus Fact: In Latin, infinitives are one-word constructions (amare, videre). In English, they are two words (to love, to see). It was impossible to split an infinitive in Latin, therefore the experts said we can't do it in English where not only was it possible, it was often the better option. Thankfully, many of these rules have fallen out of favor in educational settings. It only took the better part of three centuries.

⁴This list is entirely subjective. These are just some of the writers who, at one time or another, made me put down the book and momentarily give up writing altogether, knowing I could never top what I had just read.  It was off the top of my head, and I can think of twenty or thirty more I could include.