The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

by Bill Bryson

Indeed, as he increasingly masters his native tongue, he tries to make it conform to more logical rules than the language itself may possess, saying “buyed,” “eated,” and “goed” because, even though he has never heard such words spoken, they seem more logical to him—as indeed they are, if you stopped and thinked about it.

I LOVE contextual humor like this!

But the polysemic champion must be set. Superficially it looks like a wholly unseeming monosyllable, the verbal equivalent of the single-celled organism. Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participial adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words—the length of a short novel—to discuss them all.

Set sets a record it seems

A word that shows just how wide-ranging these changes can be is nice, which was first recorded in 1290 with the meaning of stupid and foolish. Seventy-five years later Chaucer was using it to mean lascivious and wanton. Then at various times over the next 400 years it came to mean extravagant, elegant, strange, slothful, unmanly, luxurious, modest, slight, precise, thin, shy, discriminating, dainty, and—by 1769—pleasant and agreeable.

Occasionally, because the sense of the word has changed, fossil expressions are misleading. Consider the oft-quoted statement “the exception proves the rule.” Most people take this to mean that the exception confirms the rule, though when you ask them to explain the logic in that statement, they usually cannot. After all, how can an exception prove a rule? It can’t. The answer is that an earlier meaning of prove was to test (a meaning preserved in proving ground) and with that meaning the statement suddenly becomes sensible—the exception tests the rule.

Things are so confusing that even native users have shown signs of mental fatigue and left us with two forms meaning the same thing: flammable and inflammable, iterate and reiterate, ebriate and inebriate, habitable and inhabitable, durable and perdurable, fervid and perfervid, gather and forgather, ravel and unravel.

No other language in the world has more words spelled the same way and yet pronounced differently. Consider just a few: heard — beard road — broad five — give fillet — skillet early — dearly beau — beauty steak — streak ache — mustache low — how doll — droll scour — four four — tour grieve — sieve paid — said break — speak