Butterflies and Skipping Stones

Considering the number of things that fascinate me, you’d think I’d be a lot smarter than I am. But my intellect is more the butterfly or skipping-stones variety, flitting/skipping from one fascination to the next without taking the time to really explore any one thing in any great depth.

This morning, in the period between being totally asleep and fully awake, I was thinking/dreaming of the interobang. I love the interobang, though it is very seldom seen—more or less doomed by the simple fact that it came along after the invention of most typewriter and computer keyboards and its limited usage even if there were keyboard room for it.

The interobang, as you probably know, is a combined question mark and exclamation point, for use in cases where a sentence can be either a question or a statement, generally of incredulity, such as “You’re kidding me!?”

And from the interobang, I flitted to the fact that the shortest words in the English language are “a” and “I” which are both, in themselves letters, though “I” has to be capitalized to qualify. And then I moved on to the fact that many words are pronounced as letters of the alphabet: bee, see/sea, gee, I/eye/aye, Jay/jay, Kay/quay (Jay and Kay are only letters that are also names), el, oh, pea/pee, cue/queue, are, tee/tea, you/ewe/yew, ex, and why (fudging a bit on this if you pronounce the “wh”, which most people don’t).

Which, of course brought me to a favorite fact, that there are sentences which can be spoken but cannot be written—as in the plural of multiply-spelled words. You can easily say “there are three (to/two/too or you/yew/ewe or I/eye/aye)s in English” but you can’t write it down without spelling out all the variations.

English, I have heard, is one of the most difficult to learn of all languages because it is so flexible, and there are more exceptions to rules than there are rules. The prefix “dis” (disassemble, disagree, disappear, disloyal) generally means the opposite of the stand-alone word it’s attached to. Yet I’ve never heard of anyone being “gruntled” or of an “aster”…though there are some interesting possible links in words like “disgrace.” The same is true of the prefix “in” (incredible, inedible, inappropriate, indecent) which can lull you into a false sense of security until you come across a word like “inflammable”, which means exactly the same as “flammable.”

Where words come from, and the relationship between words is endlessly fascinating. It’s amazing how little thought most of us give to them. I don’t know how many times I’ve used the example that the word “breakfast” literally means “break the fast of the night,” and how over the course of time words lose their clarity through mispronunciation (“president” was, I’m sure, originally pronounced “preside-ent”, which is the exact definition of the word: the president presides over the nation).

I know my more educated friends, upon reading this, will probably jump all over it, pointing out innumerable errors, misconceptions, etc. To which I reply, with all due respect: “Tough.”

The accuracy of my beliefs and assumptions aside, the fact remains that in response to the old “if you were stranded on a desert island, what one book would you take” question, my answer would be “an unabridged dictionary.” Every word of every book ever written or ever to be written is in there. The fun would be in knowing what every word means, and in putting them all together again.

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