15 Reasons Why The English Language Is Completely Ridiculous

If English is your mother tongue, you probably don't really think about all the crazy things we say and write every day. Prepare to have your mind blown by your own language.

1. We have a ton of ways to make nouns plural.

Here are a few ways we change nouns from singular to plural:
Add 's' (dogs)
Add 'es' (boxes)
No change (moose)
Drop the 'y' and add 'ies' (parties)
'us' to 'i' (nuclei)
'um' to 'a' (data)
'f' to 'ves' (hooves)
Plenty of other words don't even have rules for changing to their plural form. (child-> children, man-> men, mouse-> mice, ox -> oxen)

2. The verb 'to get' is a serious overachiever

Here's a sampling of the many ways we can use it:
to obtain (I got permission to go to the concert.)
to receive (He gets a letter from his dad every week.)
to buy (She got eggs and milk at the store.)
to arrive (We got to Brooklyn at 11:00 at night.)
to become (He always gets sick after he travels.)
to understand (After he repeated himself, I got what he was saying.)
to be allowed (She gets to have dessert if she eats all her dinner.)
to convince (He finally got me to go out with him.)
to have (We've got three hours until we need to leave.)

And that's just scratching the surface.

3. Silent letters. Silent letters everywhere.

While some silent letters, such as 'e,' serve to alter the sound of other letters in the word (kit vs. kite), others seem to just be there for fun. What's up with the 'b' in 'dumb,' or the 'p' in 'psychology?' The 'k' in 'knife' and the 'g' in 'gnat' just enjoy messing with us, and the 'w' in 'write' doesn't even know what's going on.

4. We have a special sentence structure for adventure-like actions.

It's never enough to simply say, "I white-water rafted last summer." When we perform actions that are more like adventures, we use 'go' and an '-ing' verb to tell everyone that our experience wasn't just an everyday activity. "We go white-water rafting." "She went skydiving." Even things we do every weekend sound more exciting when we use this structure. Doesn't "We drank," sound way less fun than, "We went drinking?"

5. Words that are spelled exactly the same can have two different pronunciations.

The girl with the bow in her hair had to bow to the king. A dove dove from the sky. I already read the book that you wanted to read. Even native speakers might have to look twice at these sentences to figure out how these frustrating words are pronounced, and context is the only way to tell the difference.

6. And words that are pronounced the same can be spelled very differently.

She got the flu after she flew on the plain plane. The wind blew across the blue sea that you can see. Their two friends that they're talking to are sitting over there. The homophones in these sentences are easy enough to differentiate when you read them, but when spoken aloud, the only thing that lets you know that they're not communicating the same idea is their context.

7. Rules are made and then broken.

While most other languages have a few irregularities when it comes to their grammar rules, English likes to disregard them entirely just because. For example, our reflexive pronouns include 'myself,' 'yourself,' 'ourselves,' 'herself,' and 'itself,' but if you say 'hisself,' you sound really uneducated... even though it would make a lot more sense to say it than the correct word, 'himself.' And going through all our irregular past tense verbs (run->ran, sit-> sat, come-> came, put-> put) would take all day.

8. Our laziness has changed the pronunciation of our own language.

Many letters and letter combinations in American English have evolved to have completely different pronunciations because it's simply harder to move our tongues to say them the way they were originally pronounced. For example, the second 't' in 'turtle' is pronounced like a 'd,' the 'tr' in 'truck' is pronounced like 'ch,' and the 'dr' in 'draw' is pronounced like a 'j.'

9. Phrasal verbs will give you a headache.

Phrasal verbs are just like normal verbs, except they are connected to a preposition and enjoy making things weird. Some of them are fairly simple: turning on a TV and turning off a TV are complete opposites. But if you fill in a form and your friend fills out a form, you're doing the same thing. And let's not forget how hard it is to get up the morning after getting down all night.

10. Some words are only used for sarcasm.

Sarcasm is used in English far more frequently than in other languages, but our language takes it a step further by creating its own terms that are ONLY used sarcastically. If you call someone a wise man, they'll take it as a compliment, but calling them a wise guy might start a fight. Non-native English speakers have a slim chance of understanding the difference, and if you haven't been completely immersed in American culture? Yeah, fat chance.

11. Many words are similar, but have very different uses.

'Watch' and 'see' are very similar verbs, with the only difference being that the former is active and the latter is something we do without trying. So then why is it that we can watch TV or watch a movie, but we can't see TV (although we can see a movie)? 'Say' and 'tell' are also tricky verbs; we can tell Fred hello and say goodbye to him, but we can't "say" a story to him--- we have to tell him the story.

12. We have a bunch of dialects.

You'll find varied dialects no matter where you go in the world, but in a place as large and diverse as the United States, they can be even harder to keep up with... even if you've spoken English your whole life. To talk to a large group of people, many northerners say "you all," while southerners will say "y'all" or even "all y'all." But if you go to Pittsburgh with your friends, you might be referred to as "yinz." And of course, the ever-heated debate over whether it's "pop," "soda," or "coke" might never stop raging.

13. Our accents can completely transform words.

You'll find different accents within a language no matter where you travel, but if someone were to travel to England, Australia, and the United States, they might wonder if the same language was actually spoken in all three countries. Take, for example, "water." In the U.S., we pronounce it "WAH-der." In England, it's pronounced, "WO-tuh." In Australia, "WO-dah." But if the accent difference wasn't confusing enough...

14. Some words completely change their meaning depending on where you're from.

If you tell someone in the U.S. that you like their pants, they'll appreciate your fashion sense. If you say the same thing to someone in England, you might get slapped, since the word means "underwear" across the pond. Putting jelly on a sandwich is commonplace in the States, but in the U.K., they'll think you're crazy. After all, for them, "jelly" is what we call "Jell-o."

15. It changes so fast that we sometimes can't even keep up with it.

Slang and formal English have always evolved as time goes on, but with the Internet becoming more and more influential in our daily lives, people that once considered themselves "hip" are now feeling pretty out of touch. Five years ago, hearing someone say, "I will never eat anchovies because ew," would sound completely nuts, but thanks to web culture, putting nouns or exclamations right after "because" is becoming commonplace. I wonder what crazy transformations our language will undergo next?