Monday, December 17, 2012

Playing with Words


As some might say:

This post is apropos of nothing

Meaning:
Without reference to anything.
Without any apparent reason or purpose.

But it highlights one of the oddities of the English language.

Something like those nonsensical rules of some plurals, like if the plural for goose is geese, why isn't the plural of moose meese?


Or if one is mouse and more is mice

And one is louse and more is lice

Why isn't douse the singular of dice?


When we speak of one human, we say, well, human

when we speak of more than one human, we say humans

yet, one man is man, more than one man is men

It follows that more than one human should be humen

Why is this not so?

And just to split hairs further, we could say a human is a man.

A woman could be a huwoman

Well, that's not easy to say, so human woman would have to do.

But there we go again using the word man twice to describe the other gender.

I could have the same argument with female. Shouldn't there be a word that does not rely on a masculine root word? [Even the word she is dependent on the word he]

Yes of course, there is the word lady. But I have heard many that could be called that word insist it has bad connotations and they do not like to be called lady.

[Girl and boy don't count as they are words for children.]

We have to celebrate that there is a completely different word for a possessive pronoun – his and her[s].

So, wowee!

And you have to admit the words masculine and feminine are different, except for the final ine.

-- Cat [who, guess what, could be called feminist--]



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