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Have you read the one about ...
You lovers of the English language might enjoy this. Can you read these right the first time?
1) The bandage was wound around the wound.
2) The farm was used to produce produce.
3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
4) We must polish the Polish furniture.
5) He could lead if he would get the lead out.
6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
8) A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum
9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
10) I did not object to the object.
11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
13) They were too close to the door to close it.
14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.
15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
18) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.
19) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
20) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
Let's face it English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat. We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth, beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?
If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell?
How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which, an alarm goes off by going on.
English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all. That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible.
PS. Why doesn't "Buick" rhyme with "quick"
There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other twoletter word, and that is "UP."
It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP? At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do we speak UP and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report?
We call UP our friends. And we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, we warm UP the leftovers and clean UPthe kitchen. We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car. At other times the little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses. To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special.
And this UP is confusing: A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP. We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night.
We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP! To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP, look the word UP in the dictionary. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4th of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions. If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more. When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP. When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP.
When it rains, it wets the earth and often messes things UP.
When it doesn't rain for awhile, things dry UP.
One could go on and on, but I'll wrap it UP, for now my time is UP, so............ Time to shut UP....!
Oh...one more thing:
What is the first thing you do in the morning & the last thing you do at night? U-P
Bad for you ...
Fifteen days ago, I read that smoking can kill you; The next day I stopped smoking.
Twelve days ago, I read that too much red meat can kill you; The next day I stopped eating red meat..
Eight days ago, I read that drinking can kill you; The next day I stopped drinking.
Yesterday, I read that having sex can kill you; This morning I stopped reading.
COMPUTER VIRUSES
Bush Virus Causes your computer to keep looking for viruses of mass destruction.
The John Kerry Virus Stores data on both sides of the disk and causes little purple hearts to appear on screen.
The Clinton Virus Gives you a permanent Hard Drive ; with NO memory
The Al Gore Virus Causes your computer to keep counting and re-counting
The Bob Dole Virus Makes a new hard drive out of an old floppy
The Lewinsky Virus Sucks all the memory out of your computer, then e-mails everyone about what it did
The Arnold Schwarzenegger Virus Terminates some files, leaves, but will be back
The Mike Tyson Virus Quits after two bytes
The Oprah Winfrey Virus Your 200 GB hard drive shrinks to 100 GB, then slowly expands to re-stabilize around 350 GB
The Ellen Degeneres Virus Disks can no longer be inserted
The Prozac Virus Totally screws up your RAM, but your processor doesn't care
The Michael Jackson Virus Only attacks minor files
The Lorena Bobbitt Virus Reformats your hard drive into a 3.5 inch floppy ... then discards it through Windows
The Hillbilly ...
After living in the remote wilderness of Kentucky all his life, the old hillbilly decided it was time to visit the big city. In one of the stores he picks up a mirror and looked in it. Not knowing what it was, he remarked,"How about that; here's a picture of my daddy."
He bought the 'picture', but on the way home he remembered his wife, Lizzy,did not like his father, so he hung it in the barn and every morning before leaving for the fields, he would go to the barn and look at it.
Lizzy began to get suspicious of these many trips to the barn so one day after her husband left, she searched the barn and found the mirror.
As she looked into the mirror, she fumed and said to herself, "So that's the ugly bitch he's running around with."
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