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.
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Imagine the day when we'll all be able to communicate clearly, in a language probably none of us has ever even heard of. I imagine it is whatever Adam and Eve spoke, but we have no idea what it was.
I'd want to call out, "May Day!", but is that the day of the year or a call for help?
Well, “May Day” would be the day of the year, as you say (or the traditional spring festival held near that day), while “Mayday!” is the distress signal. You would want to indicate whether you are saying that as two separate words or with “may” and “day” run together. If you needed to abandon ship and it happened to be May 1st, you would really need to pronounce that correctly, or your shipmates might reply, “We don’t need a calendar, buddy. We have smartwatches!” And you need to say it right also if you are wishing to go to May Day, Kansas; otherwise, you might end up in Mayday, Colorado. :-D
I needed to look up the meaning of “TLA,” having never heard that acronym before (I “text” on my cell phone using the microphone, so I never type acronyms). I learned that “TLA” is an autological word, “expressing a property that it also possesses.” Of course, I loved that (along with puns, oxymorons, Tom Swifties, Spoonerisms, palindromes, Wellerisms, etc.). I always enjoy the wordplay here!
"TLA" has long been a standing joke of mine since the Air Force. Everything was a "Three-Letter Acronym" it seemed and using a three-letter acronym to designate it was just fun.
I figured with your Air Force stint you would appreciate the “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!” clarification, too. :)
I distinctly recall a homework assignment in my 10th grade English class where we were to take a passage of dialog from a Shakespeare play (which we were studying) and rewrite it using current-day slang, i.e. “translating” it to circa 1972 vernacular. Being a word nerd (already, at age 16), I had a fun time incorporating all the 1960s “hippie” jargon I could think of. I’ve seen some fun pieces of writing using TLAs based on business scenarios, and we all know the government creates many a word salad with their many abbreviations. Yeah, “It’s all English to me!”
That is a thought-provoking suggestion. When I asked AI Overview, “what language did Adam and Eve speak?” (out of great curiosity), it proposed it was an early form of Hebrew (you can read their explanations yourself if you wish). Very interesting! I assumed that they spoke Latin, since Adam named all the animals, and we know that animal species names are all in Latin. LOL!
Just to be clear, Lorna, the "May Day" pun doesn't work if I separate "May Day" from "mayday." That's what makes it a pun. :)
Sadly, some puns don't work in written form.
I. never had to say "mayday" when flying but I responded to quite a few as an air traffic controller!
Yikes, Glenn! I hope you got them down on the ground again safely.
Just to clarify from my end, Stan: I was raising the humor of your pun a notch by pretending to suggest that one could easily differentiate “May Day” from “Mayday” by whether or not you said the term with a pause between “may” and “day.” Of course, they sound exactly alike when spoken (i.e. that pause is not discernible), which was my joke. Try reading it again while observing my tongue in my cheek. :)
Lorna,
Yep. One student pilot was having engine control problems and I couldn't understand half of what he was saying so I got his instructor to come to the tower to talk him into fixing the problem and it all came out. Another one just wanted someone to answer him and Aurora tower was busy so he called me and it was just to get on a radio transmission as he dove to the ground in a suicide dive about four miles south of the airport. Others ran the gamut from getting them down in bad weather to finding them when they were lost!
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