I hate English.

Anyone who knows me can see the absurdity in that statement.  After all, Inverted Mind majored in English.  Heck, I’ve been a published writer for years, in subjects ranging from computer games to software development articles to sports to…well…me.  I wrote for a newspaper.  I was editor-in-chief of a small, Web-based marketing publication.  Had I not chosen to go down the software engineering path instead, I would be a professional writer today.

But let’s face it: our language is absurd.  Sure, the grammatical constructs make the most sense of any language on earth.  Of course, the relaxed standards to which we adhere in this nation today have all but eliminated poetry that would be considered among history’s finest.  But screw poetry.  While I consider myself to be well-versed (pun intended) in the intricacies of poetry, it’s linguistic fluff.  I’m talking about the way we allow words to be spelled in America.  That’s where my beef with the language lies.

What got me thinking about this was a post on a sports site I frequent, pointing out how many wild variations there are in the names of athletes.  I give you my response — verbatim, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, Lorem Ipsum and a whole bunch of other Latin words:

Aaron Rodgers is 0-2 in the Phonetic Names competition: a double-A and a superfluous D.

That said, American English is so hard because we’ve mashed together various combinations of Olde English, New(e?) English, Spanish, French, German and, of course, Latin. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, U (as in “vacuum”) and Z can be doubled but make the same sound as they would all by their lonesome; C, G and J can be hard or soft, and it’s not a medical condition; H makes other letters do weird things (CH, GH, PH, RH, SH, TH, WH, ZH); C, K, CK, KK, Q and QU can all sound the same — sometimes; and don’t get me started on dangling participles. And that’s not what you think it is, you perverts.

Welcome to the melting pot, where we can’t decide on a national language, our PRIMARY language is harder to learn than pi to 500 decimal places, and we all taste like chicken.

This is Mike from The Steel Tradition, signing off.

(I majored in English; sue me.)

This has actually led me to create a new category on this site that I’m going to call So To Speak in which I will discuss the insanities and inanities of the English language.  Seriously, I could write a book on this.  But I won’t, because it’s been done, and conforming isn’t exactly my style.  I value my individuality, just like the other six billion people on the planet.

Wait…that doesn’t sound right…