Sixteen Volts

English is among natural languages pretty much what C++ is among the programming languages: fun and so widespread that it is virtually standard lingua franca, but under the surface the language is far more difficult that most people realize, so that most of its users can't help but just use it wrong and make constant little mistakes. Although as The Danimal once pointed out, thanks to its difficulty, English handily serves as a rough practical IQ test, so that if somebody cannot master this language despite trying but keeps making stupid and elementary errors, he is unlikely to be able to handle other cognitively demanding tasks. I second this, because I have noticed that even if two people are equally new to speaking English and has only limited knowledge of it, the way that they speak it is totally different, if one of them is intelligent while the other one is not.

But there is no need to artificially keep the finer points of the language in arcana, but list everything openly in public so that people can read and learn. When I showed the site "Common Errors in English" to my wife, she told me that she's going to email the link to everybody at her office, especially her pet peeve "return back". She is such a stickler for proper language that she occasionally even takes out her pen and corrects posters and other things in public.

I also notice that the site is missing my pet peeve, talking about "The Da Vinci Code", which is doubly redundant. First, "The" and "Da" are the same definite article in two different languages (although even today some dialects of English still use "da" as the definite article, which proves my point), and "Vinci" is Italian for "code", so when you say "The Da Vinci Code", you are essentially saying "The The Code Code". So you should simply say "Da Vinci", just like you would say "HIV", "PIN" and "ATM" instead of "HIV virus", "PIN number" and "ATM machine". Perhaps I should email the proprietor of this site and suggest that he adds it there.

(By the way, is it "... and suggest that he add it there" or "... and suggest that he adds it there" ? Or are both right? English sure is difficult.)

At the same site, we can also note the page "Non-Errors" for when people make the mistake of believing that something is wrong even though it is actually perfectly right. This remound me of the way Finns who speak English often make the mistake of using Finnish structures and idioms in English, but to my surprise, sometimes these are right. For example, when something needs to be done right now and not wait until later, Finns say that it is "korkea aika" (a "high time") to do it. But I have seen many non-Finns write that it is "high time" to do something. The first time I saw this, I thought that somebody is speaking Finglish. Is this really a proper English idiom of saying it?

Last but not least, we can also note the page "Grating English" at Lloydian Aspects. Speaking of which, I noticed that Lloyd has put up a new page "How this site got banned" that discusses the aftermath of the vegetarians making the university remove his anti-vegetarian page from their domain.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Friday, July 14, 2006 at 12:40 PM