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July 21, 2005 I used the word ‘stratagem’ in an article I was writing recently, and though I knew perfectly well that that is the correct spelling, it suddenly occurred to me that it disagrees with the words ‘strategy’ and ‘strategic’. I knew all these words come ultimately from ‘strategos’, the Greek word for ‘army general’. Shouldn’t ‘stratagem’ really be ‘strategem’? So I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, to which I have access online with my Los Angeles Public Library card. Sure enough, the word was originally ‘strategem’, but somehow over the centuries it has become discombobulated. Yet if you were a high-school or college student, spelling it ‘strategem’ would be accounted wrong. What makes it even sillier is that spelling it either way would not affect the pronunciation, which neither spelling reflects in any great measure anyway. Also the first ‘a’ and the second ‘a’ are entirely different sounds, but don’t let that stop English-speakers. There’s nothing the English language needs so much as to be beaten with a carpet-beater for several hours, laundered in millions of gallons of clean, fresh water and left under a brilliant sun to dry. Did you ever wonder why so many words in English end in ‘y’ anyway when it would have been just as reasonable to have them end in ‘i’? Newer English words from foreign languages may end in ‘i’, like ‘salami’, ‘graffiti’, ‘macaroni’, ‘okapi’, ‘swami’, ‘kiwi’, ‘yogi’, ‘coatimundi’. But regular English words have ‘y’: ‘lady’, ‘tummy’, ‘starchy’, ‘manly’, ‘sandy’, ‘ruddy’, ‘jeopardy’. This started out as an affectation. Certain penmen thought that adding a flourish to the letter ‘i’ was a nifty innovation. The stupid little fad caught on and became the norm in English. Otherwise, we might have had ‘ladi’, ‘tummi’, ‘starchi’ and the rest. Nowadays, some people think it is a nifty innovation to change ‘y’ to ‘i’, so we have girls named ‘Toni’, ‘Bobbi’, ‘Lori’, ‘Meri’, ‘Patti’ and the like. This fad has passed into two other far-flung languages: Hungarian and Malagasy, which is spoken on Madagascar. The famous Esterhazy family of Hungary was originally the Esterhazi family. Likewise, the word ‘Malagasy’ itself was originally ‘Malagasi’. Then you have words like ‘Ypsilanti’, the name of a city in Michigan. How many times have I hear people say ‘Yipsilanti’ when it should be pronounced ‘Ipsilanti’? ‘Ypsilanti’ was a hero of the Greek Revolution of the 1820’s, and in Greek, ‘y’ is always a vowel, never a consonant. There are some ambiguous words in the English dictionary that annoy me no end, because it would be such a simple matter to correct them. Two of these are ‘secretary’ and ‘minister’. If you use the word ‘secretary’ without any telltale context, one generally visualizes an attractive lady sitting at a desk typing letters, a single flower in a narrow cut-glass jar before her on her desk. But this picture is a far cry from that of Rumsfeld or Powell. Can’t there be one word for the head of one of the cabinets of the US government and another for a girl Friday in a business office? Well, we could do as they do in foreign countries and speak of the ‘minister’ of defense or state, but then we would have the problem that some religious operators are called ‘ministers’. There are three ways to solve this problem. Religious ministers could be called ‘preachers’ exclusively, or a new noun, like ‘sermonist’ or 'gospeleer', could be invented, or we could just abolish ministers. And what about the word ‘cabinet’? When someone says that a woodworker is going to make changes to his cabinet, he means something a little different from what he means when he says the president is going to make changes to his cabinet. Speaking of the word ‘change’, and I am referring specifically to a context of cash transactions, did you ever stop to think that the word ‘change’ has three very distinct meanings. When we say, “Do you have change for a $20 bill?”, what we mean is an assortment of other denominations, usually bills but possibly coins too, whose total value is $20. When the saleslady says, “Here’s your change?”, she is speaking of the balance due you after a purchase in which you gave her a bill exceeding the amount of the purchase. This is usually a combination of bills and coins, but could consist exclusively of either bills or coins. If pay $100 for a $95 purchase, you’ll probably get a single $5 bill. But if you say, “I don’t have change for the laundromat,” what you mean is “coins”. Is this a trifle? Maybe. I’m not sure. But in a foreign language, there may be different words. In Spanish, money returned after a purchase is “vuelto”. Other denominations are called “cambio”. Coins are “monedas”. In Russian, the three words are ‘zdachi’, ‘smjena’ and ‘monjety’. This sort of thing complicates learning foreign languages. But it’s a mutual phenomenon. Sometimes Spanish or Russian will have only one word where English has three, all with appreciable differences in meaning At any rate the word ‘change’ has so many meanings, in addition to these three, that sorting it all out exceeds my intelligence anyway! But I love to sit around and think about these things just the same. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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