A poem about the English language,
And its propensity to baffle and bandage,
With loose rules and easy tools
Grammar, lexicon and syntax.
So, on we go to hard questions and facts
Now, why would you lead in the present
And last week you led,
But if I was reading yesterday
I was not in Reading.
Maybe because Red was once the only colour of its kind
Until fruit introjuiced us orange into our minds,
A terrible word to have in a poem -
Like silver, it has no rhyming brother.
But enough of those words – I’m not bothered.
Instead, I’d like to think carefully about the good, the great
, The stuff that makes the unnatives irate,
and how us, with a good English manner
Seem to enjoy flexing our grammar
How Bill Shakespeare invented ED-ing our nouns
Giving us so many new sounds.
And new verbs.
Elbow into elbowed was the first and
And those of you who’ve ever thirsted
For boozing will know that almost any word
Of your choosing can clearly relate
The festering, foul state
Of the utter inebriate
Simply by turning a thing
Into what you once were doing
“Last night, I was totally tabletopped,
Muttonchopped,
Bottled,
Throttled,
Nettled,
Kettled.”
Not to be confused with Ketty.-
Or! You could exalt the language alphabetically,
By using the letters phonetically
We could seek and explore
More of the riches of English’s silliness
To start at random with frilliness
“Yes – F
We waste time when we faff…
We hate the odd tiff…
We puff ourselves up…
As much as we fluff up filibusters…
Not to be confused with fluffing…
That’s pornographic -
But again, English is far from autocratic
So, you see we can find with particular eases
The confusing mess that English teases
Us and the foreigner alike
But for my money I think it’s rather alright
Part two
So how about a second parter
And we return to what we started
When we found
how we find amusing
When English’s idiocy
Gets too confusing
And sets off
Those with short fuses
>This English lark is such a doozy<
What could that mean?
Is it easy to explain?
Or am I being mean
To my foreign friends
Leading them down rabbit holes
To meet false friends
A surgeon may perform an incision
And in so doing be incisive
With all the prerequisite precision
They needed
When they decided
To be decisive
Yet precisely my point
One rule for them
One rule for us
All animals and words are equal
But some are worth more fuss
But before you turn away
Disguising your disgust
Just remember that
We englicans and anglish
So the seeds of our own distrust
Take the cludes for a moment:
The precludes
But never postcludes
The excludes
And occludes
Which include
But don’t misclude
Or declude
Or reclude
It’s all a bit over or under
But certainly not just whelming
And if you’re still not sure
Perhaps you missed a beat
Went over your head
But not under your feet
I’m afraid I can’t help you
You’ve come far enough
But if I’ve fooled you
Thinking I know this language
At all
It was all just a bluff!
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