Never Trust a Prefix

One of my favourite aspects of language is the peculiar logic of it.  It's more like architecture than math; while lacking in algorithms and precise, right-or-wrong answers, it does rely on structure - you can build a house of materials ranging from paper to granite, but certain things have to be in place to keep it from falling into a formless heap and, with a base of knowledge and application of sense, you can pretty well figure out what various objects are for.  Language is the same way, with its parts of speech, marks of punctuation, prefixes and suffixes, and so on.

And then, for no apparent reason, it throws you a curveball.  It all makes sense, right up until you get something like "inflammable."  "In-" is a suffix usually meaning "not."  Someone who is insane isn't sane; they might be incoherent, too, because coherency, or intelligible diction, usually comes from a well-ordered mind.  So it seems that, if "flammable" means "readily set on fire," "inflammable" would mean "fireproof."

Except that it doesn't.  Why this is the case I have no idea.  It has, however, held a prominent place in  my awareness since the ripe old age of three, thanks to a family friend and neighbour.   Ray was, and presumably still is, a fantastic person - warm, kind, generous, hard-working, and funny.  She lived next door to us with her husband and two grandsons, aged eight and three, whom she and her husband had taken on after their daughter's mental illness took a turn for the worse.  Having another kid underfoot didn't really seem to bother her, so I spent a lot of time over there, convincing Stephan, the younger grandson, to eat insects.*

Mind Your To's and Two's

Like any self-respecting nerd, I spend a lot of time on the internet.  Since I'm not much of a gamer, a fair bit of this time passes in the noble pursuit of snickering derangedly at the World Wide Web's myriad proofs of what a varied and bizarre world this is.

In other words, I really like funny blogs.  One of my favourites is Cake Wrecks, even if it contributes to my constant desire to eat everything that holds still long enough.  It makes up for this by reliably making me laugh uproariously.  On the other hand, it also reliably kills any tender sprig of faith in humanity, or at least humanity's grasp of basic grammar, that might have sprouted over the week.  Of the repeat offenders, one of the worst is "too/to/two."

Tempting though it might be to say "it's an incompetent baker thing" and leave it at that, it isn't.  This confusion crops up everywhere.  People will advertise their businesses in crowded public spaces using the wrong freaking word!

At least part of the reason for this ubiquitous error, I lay at the door of spell check.  In most regards, it's a life-saver, or at least a dignity-saver and/or coherence-saver.  The exception, as I've previously mentioned, comes up when you type the wrong word.  It's a word! It's spelled right!  It just makes no sense, and spell check, not being actually sapient, can't tell.  The typist, who relies on spell check, in turn doesn't catch the mistake because it isn't red-underlined, annnnd there you go.

What on Earth is a Gife?!: Or, Why Fonts are Important

"Gife Begins in the Garden," proclaims the sign posted in a place of pride in the well-tended flowerbed of a woman whose paper I deliver.  In testament to my stellar observational skills, it somehow took me until yesterday to notice this, whereupon I stood there and stared at it for a good minute and a half while the busily whirring gears of my brain ground to a halt and made weird ka-chunk noises in an attempt to process this.

I couldn't help thinking of my mum's story of her first encounter with a nutria (a very large rodent of South American origins) in Portland; there she sat in her car, overcome with shocked indignation that someone had up and invented an animal and not told her!  That's about how I felt about this.  When had this mysterious word come into being?  Who could be held responsible? Most importantly, what on earth did it MEAN?!  The garden's owner holds some pretty extreme political and religious beliefs on the opposite end of the spectrum from mine.  Perhaps, I thought, it might be some form of jargon, not necessarily political or religious but gardening-related.

Either way, her car's place in the driveway was empty, and besides, its not exactly good form to knock on someone's door just to ask what a sign in their flowerbed means.  At last I resigned myself to mystery, picked up my newspaper bag, and moved on.

Idio(t)ms, Part II

"It's always the last place you look!"

No kidding, Dad.  Once I've found it, whatever "it" happens to be, why on earth would I keep looking for it?  Of course, that's not what the saying means; that's what it says, though.  In all honesty, I would have happily drifted through life never questioning that "it's always the last place you look" means "it's always the last place you think to look," with no need for clarification, if my mother hadn't pointed it out to me.

Evidently, her own dad really wound her up with this sometime in her seventh year of life or thereabouts.  Winding her up is pretty easy - we're talking about a woman whose capacity for indignation extends to the laws of physics.  The sources of her indignation, however, usually make sense, even if they're nothing that any human being anywhere can do a damn thing to change.

Why Are Thursdays?

"I could never get the hang of Thursdays," gripes one of the main characters of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Surprising though this may be, I've never had my house or planet levelled by bureaucrats, my best friend isn't an alien, and I don't always know where my towel is, because sometimes I hide things from myself for reasons that elude me.  I think maybe I do it to keep my life interesting.

Mr. Dent and I agree resoundingly on the subject of Thursdays, though.  There's probably some rational reason for their frequently frustrating, irritating, depressing, or just plain weird nature; four days into a five-day week, you're tired enough to err more often and for things to get to you more easily, but one more weekday remains between you and the light at the end of the tunnel.*

That's all fine and good. Rationality, yay!  Rationality, I maintain, doesn't really  begin to explain them, though.  Just as some people need God to reconcile themselves with the world, I need to believe that Thursdays are the world's way of telling people to take a long rock off a short pier.   Planning on having a productive and satisfying day on which you do not unwittingly dry your private parts with a large spider or discover that one of your customers apparently doesn't exist? Ha-ha, good luck, sucker!  It's THURSDAY.

Angst, Delicious Angst!

Once upon a time, someone whose opinion I valued highly told me "You'll be a very nice person, if you ever stop being so self-centred." She was right, on all counts; as an adolescent I, like many people my age, did tend to think about myself to excess - not in a positive light, necessarily, and indeed often negatively but there was this constant stream of thinking about myself.  And it needed to stop.  This is part of growing up.

However, to a self-loathing eighteen-year-old, this hurt like a...well, you know.  That sting still lingers.  For a long time, I think it made me even more self-centred because I spent so much time worrying about being self-centred.  Yeah.  Logical.  I know.

In this, as in many things, my girlfriend had some words of wisdom.  She didn't intend them to be about me, but rather about herself.

"Yeah, I'm self-centred.  I'm not selfish.  I just sort of worry about my own problems, because I know about them, because I'm there, but that doesn't mean I don't care about anyone else's or think I'm better than them."

Hope is a Fuel

The concept of hope, like the stylized heart symbol, crops up so often in Hallmark cards, inspirational posters, and mealy-mouthed platitudes that for a long time, I got really sick of it.  This stemmed in part from the frequency with which I'd seen people act like simply hoping was enough - as if resolve, determination, planning, and working your butt off are just sort of incidental.  Combined with a long streak of things seldom going well, and I'd pretty firmly adopted the opinion that hope is a load of bunk.

That's not to say I went swimming in the Slough of Despond of anything.  Well, I did, sort of, but that was mostly unrelated.  Oh no, I stuck to bitter pragmatism; get a goal in mind and work on it, and either you'll succeed or you won't.  Hope is for pansies!  The nice thing about being a fatalist, I told people, is that not only do you avoid disappointment, you even get a pleasant surprise now and then.

"Yeah," my girlfriend told me, "but it's a lot glummer along the way."