May Day!!

A friend of mine spent time in Greece. While there, he asked someone, "When you want to express that it doesn't make sense to you, what do you say?" He was, of course, referring to our "It's all Greek to me" phrase. The man smiled and told him their phrase was "It's all Chinese to me." Perfect. Years ago, God imported a "Chinese mission field" to our house in the form of Gao. He was a Chinese student who came to the company I worked for to work for a year and we put him up. A wonderful experience. I taught him about Jesus and how to speak better English and he told me about Chinese. Every word, he told me, has at least four different meanings, depending on the tone you use. Great—a language more difficult than English. Still, English is tough enough.

We have homographs, words spelled the same but pronounced differently with different meanings, such as "invalid" meaning a disability and "invalid" meaning not valid, or "lead" meaning to guide or a metal. There is "wind" which can be moving air or a twisted path. There are "semantic reversals" such as "awful" that once meant "full of awe and wonder" and now means "very bad: or "nice" which once conveyed "ignorant," then "fussy," and now "pleasant." "Holiday" meant "holy day," but no longer. "Build" meant "make a house," but now it means making anything. "Meat" meant food in general and is now animal flesh. There's the whole "mouse" and "mice" plural but not "house" and "hice" or "goose" and "geese" but not "moose" and "meece." "Oversight" might mean to supervise or to fail to notice. "Fast" can have three distinct meanings: "quick," "not eating," or "tightly held." You might "clip" a coupon and "clip" it to another piece of paper. On, and on.

Eventually it becomes too much. Modern English speakers can't agree on the rules and can't agree on the meanings and wonder why communication is such a problem. Learning English properly has become "too boring" or "too cumbersome" and the singular rule, "Every rule has an exception," only makes it worse. So they shorten it to TLAs and acronyms that become their own secret codes and think, "Now we're communicating." But ... we ain't. Oh ... sorry ... aren't. I'd want to call out, "May Day!", but is that the day of the year or a call for help? Maybe "It's all English to me" would be more appropriate phrase.