Many people cannot even begin to comprehend the importance of language in our lives. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to communicate! I know that, on average, I talk to around 250 people a day. Roughly 12% of these people are older than me while about 88% of them are my age or younger. I speak to all these people, and they all talk to other people. At the end of the day, if you think about how many people speak and are spoken to, it’s an extremely large number! When these people speak to each other, they use thousands of different words. Each one of these words represents a thing or an action or something descriptive, and they all mean different things. Think about what life would be like without words and without languages. They are our way of transferring thought from one brain to another. Without them, we would be lost.
While most people speak a language that is also spoken by others, the words that we speak every day can vary from person to person. Someone who lives at the South Pole and watches penguins all day would use different words than those used by a professional soccer player. Every person even has different curse words that they tend to use. For instance, when I’m mad, the curse word that I use the most is shieße (pronounced sheiza), which is sh*t in German. This is a tendency that I picked up in 6th grade after having taken Germen for six years in elementary school. If I were to yell sh*t down the Lovett hallway because I dropped a book on my toe, it would probably get a different reaction than if I yelled shieße because no one at Lovett speaks German! So that’s exactly what I did when I was really upset, angry or frustrated I said shieße. Now, this word isn’t part of the English language, but, to tell the truth, I don’t really cuss in English anymore. Mainly because everyone I’m around when I cuss in English understands what I say and I can get in trouble around my parents!
When there are so many people speaking so many different words every day, there are certain words and phrases that are bound to be re-used and made famous because of their meaning. We call these phrases quotes because we are quoting what other people have previously said. Personally, I have many quotes that I like, but one of my favorites is, “Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. And today? Today is a gift. That is why we call it the present.” By B. Olatuji. This quote reminds us to live in the present– not to dream about the future or dwell on things that have already passed, but to live life to it’s fullest and control what you are doing now. I am a big believer in staying in the moment and understanding the full potential of what you can do where you are in life. If you spend your whole life dreaming about the past then that’s the only place you’ll ever be, in the past. Another of my favorite quotes is by Confucius; “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” This reminds us that it’s ok to be wrong and to fail, but when we do, we need to try again. When it comes to quotes, it is how you interpret them and what the words mean to you personally that matters the most.
Of all the different phrases that we have in the English language, I think that there are some words that are overused. For instance OMG, which is slang for oh my God/gosh. This phrase has been so overused that when someone uses it while texting or I.M.ing, it’s considered kind of strange, but if you say it when speaking, it’s even worse. Though many consider this to be an annoyance, the more pressing issue is words that are under- used. The biggest example of this is people’s names. The word that everyone likes to hear most is his or her own name. Would you rather some one call you “ hey what’s you face” or by your name? A person’s name is the word that makes them truly individual and special in their own way.
In many ways, the English language is a beautiful thing, but it can be extremely confusing and often times extremely contradictory. For example, isn’t it strange that we park our cars on a driveway, and we drive our cars on a parkway. That is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the English language. Have you ever noticed that a fat chance and a slim chance mean exactly the same thing, or that Polish (as in the country) and polish (as in the thing you use to make your shoe shiny) are the same thing and are spelled the same way? As Doug Larson once said, “If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers and a catastrophe would be an astrophe with hair.” Little things like that have always bugged me and even though I love to talk English can be extremely annoying!
As you know by now we as Americans rely on English as our main form of communication. Even though our language has a lot of double meanings we mange to understand each other. There are so many words with so many different meanings that it can sometimes be confusing but all the great oportuniteis that language creates make up for it!
