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June 17, 2005 The English language is such a constant annoyance that I’d love just to abandon it and start all over. Doing searches for scientific names of various plants and animals over the past two years or so, I’ve been constantly reminded that the designations ‘kingdom’, ‘class’, ‘order’ and ‘family’ are highly ambiguous. Let’s suppose I do a search for ‘potato’. In the search box I type ‘potato class order family’, thinking I will get a search result that says ‘Magnoliopsida’, ‘Solanales’, ‘Solanaceae’. But no, I get hundreds of readings like, ‘After class, I went out with the family to order potato pancakes.’ If I type ‘potato scientific name’, I will get ‘Solanum tuberosum’, the genus and species, without getting the class, order and family. Often getting the whole pedigree back to kingdom takes several minutes, even half an hour sometimes. Why did biologists choose such ambiguous words to begin with? It would have been better just to coin new words. We could have said, for example: phylum, bylum, rylum, nylum, sylum, kylum. Then they wouldn't have had any other meanings. What difference would it make whether they have an etymological precedent? Incidentally, such a grouping is called a ‘taxon’, but stupidly the plural is ‘taxa’. Is there any good reason for importing the Greek plural along with the singular? Couldn’t we have said ‘taxons’? Look at the word 'media'. How many writers at UK say, "The media is...", instead of, "The media are..."? The word ‘order’ is ridiculous anyway. We have the Corinthian order (Greek columns), the Cistercian order (Catholic nuns), the order Phoenicopteriformes (flamingos), an order for pizza, an order to invade, law and order, the order of an equation, alphabetical order. It’s hard to imagine what all these things have to do with each other. ‘Ordo’ is the Latin word for ‘row’, not as in "row, row, row your boat," but as in "ten little Indians all in a row." Another word that seems to have endless meanings is ‘line’. We draw a line on a piece of paper. There’s a line at the theater. An elderly lady has lines under her eyes. Westinghouse has a new line of products. Dr. Smith’s line is neurosurgery. A row of words in a book is a line. Somebody snorts a line of cocaine. A tackle plays on the line. Somebody doing what he should do is walking the line. When someone may die, his life is on the line. When something lies, he is handing us a line. You fish with a line, and hang clothes on a line. An electrical cable is called a line. When you dial ‘0’ you get an outside line. A party line is either a shared telephone connection or a political doctrine. One’s ancestry is his line. A company of ships, planes or buses is a line. Leading battleships are ships of the line. An actor sometimes forgets his lines. But to line a coat is something entirely different, not the same as when elm trees line a street. Another ambiguous word that bothers me no end is ‘area’. On one hand, ‘area’ means the size in square feet, miles or kilometers. On the other, it means ‘locality’ or ‘region’. Suppose I type in ‘area of California’. I get many results like, ‘The Bay area is one of the most congested in California.’ If you are searching for the area in square miles, you cannot substitute any other word for ‘area’ without eliminating most of the potential search results. When it comes to cities, states and countries, the words ‘large’ and ‘big’ are ambiguous. The biggest city is usually the most populous, but it can also mean the city greatest in area. So which is the US’s biggest city, New York or Jacksonville? As for states, is the largest California or Alaska? I don’t see why there can’t be a word meaning ‘great in area’. Use the word ‘broad’ as the opposite of ‘narrow’, and use the word ‘wide’ to mean ‘great in area’. Then we could say, ‘Alaska is the widest state’. So all we would need is a better word than ‘populous’, say ‘peoply’. Then we could say, ‘California is the peopliest state.’ 'Most populous' is too cumbersome for such a common idea. What, pray, does the word ‘in’ mean? Why do we say that we’re in Kansas, when we are actually on Kansas? Why does something happen on Wednesday, but in January? Why not in Wednesday and on January? We say ‘in the closet’ or ‘inside of the closet’. Yet we say ‘in a hurry’ but not ‘inside of a hurry.’ What is common between being in a bottle, being in a quandary, being in a book and being in advertising. How can we say we roast turkeys in the oven and study turkeys in the library? Are there turkeys in the library? What does being in error have to do with being in the woods? And why not among the woods anyway? Why do we say, ‘in thinking this over’? Why not ‘while’? Then there's 'spring'. The athlete made a tremendous spring. A spring in the bed is broken. I love flowers that bloom in spring. I always drink spring water. They all have to do with springing, in the sense of rising and jumping, but they've wandered so far semantically, that it's time for new words. The word 'fall' is bad too. Some flowers bloom in fall. That's not her own hair; she's wearing a fall. Humpty Dumpty took a great fall, which is not quite the same thing as the fall of Rome, since the altitude of the Eternal City has always remained the same. Then there're the falls where you go on your honeymoon. ------------ 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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