You must forgive me, dear reader, for the chaos I seek to inflict upon you. Many know me as a pun-master, but I prefer to consider myself a master of corrupting language – of making the perfectly sensible seem incomprehensible. And that is what I seek to do now. Not with long words or overly-winding sentences – I should hope that in both those regards this article be reasonable.
But English is a most pernicious language. It is a wonder we did not leave it behind ages ago for something more fit-for-purpose, like Irish or Sindarin. Believe me not? Then I pray, dear reader, that you walk away from this article without the slightest clue what was said. In ignorance you shall see the truth.
I have heard that we learn best from our mistakes. If so, the English language is the best learning opportunity that has ever graced the world. Here’s why.
The Night of Bonked Heads
I will recount a day belonging along the long streams of histories forgotten. Yet for you it shall be gotten, that which was for you sworn: for you ever remembered and for you boding well. Ignorance, for you I tell this tale.
From webs and webbing they arose: trapping water with skin and bone. With bites and tears many a broken, time-hardened limb they sewed so tightly together. Ever ripping, tying, binding. A sight most tear-able: of broken twigs a raft grafted!
Ever onwards! In military fashion each strode aboard, though bored. Bored it was downstream, that raft: the raft and its raft as one! And who can say otherwise: all in perfect lines, of one mind and feather, birds unburdened they were.
Yet tides ever exact their high price: a currency of discomfort to redress the troubled waters. Over them – well, even you, Ignorance, know what was there! Yet even upon coming to it, never was it to be crossed. Such a destiny was withheld from those who sailed upon these cross hardships.
Atop that ill-fated future sat a herd: not a flock, though together they did flock. In their sleep no games did they play, and yet a game they were! Each one of feathers white, save one of black on whom fortune must have smiled this night.
Towards the herd’s station the graftling sailed: its tenants, with long necks, their gazes cast round, glowing eyes bright piercing the dark. Alas, they saw naught: not the haughty, knotty fate before them! The stream crossing they came across, all arrayed to past leave impasse, to pass it below. And be low, they should have! None of the four-sights of the paddlers could save them: disaster struck each.
A duck, yet it could not! Fowl-play followed foul quacks and cracks of heads. The rafting raft was rapidly a-paddling-paddling-paddling swiftly away. What way? Well surely many of them, for such disorder broke their rowing row into rowing! In a row they were, yet most surely in a row they were not!
To each comes the bill, as the saying goes. Of this unfortunate bridge no exception may be made: bills and bills upon it were thrown. Could it have dodged? No, for even were it possessed of motion it should have been afeared to bend down!
Where only recently a bevy of swans had landed there was no more: flight had stolen the flight. Naught but one remained, not even a bank to be bankrupt. So perhaps then it may be said to have been in the black on that day.
A Final Word
So I hope, dear Ignorance, that you have of the tail of this tale gleaned a glimmer of knowledge. That it passed over your head at first I may not blame – indeed, those there should have wished for your heady fortune!
And should you, dear reader, wonder what all this meant, I shall relate to you in a few simple words. Some ducks bonked their heads as they took a raft downriver. They disrupted a few swans, who flew off.
Think you, then, that it is a mark of our language to allow something so simple, so readily expressed, to be expressed in such confounding terms? For the English poet may write and speak as if grammar does not exist: the pun-master is worse, for they have the liberty of disregarding spelling and meaning both to make their joke!
Let us for a second think in literary terms. If words are leaves, sentences are the trees that support them. A figurative article as this may then be seen as a meta-forest, one to smile at. The tree of English is twisted and overgrown, but more than that, it is grafted from many a source. Each small fragment of it falls like twigs, and then when bound and tied suddenly becomes something more complex still: a dialect. For no two speakers speak perfectly alike.
To speak is to sail, to entrust our lives’ directions to the language’s whims! Yet if the language is a boat then with it we may forge a friend-ship, a ship to redefine and alter at our whole as well.
It is chaos incarnate. Chaos that twists and turns, that shifts and shakes and shapes itself over again. Minds it locks, thoughts it blocks, people it mocks, consistency it shocks and knocks and hocks – all for its own eldritch desires. Each day this occult power upon us will prey, until we even pray in litanies of words devoid of meaning, until our eyes touch words without true reading.
Ready to overthrow the English language now?
