Month: September 2008

Can a verb reveal ethnicity?

Verbs

The short answer: Yes.

I asked an African-American the other day where his home was.

He replied, “I stay in Katy, Texas.”

In other words, he lives in Katy.

The use of the verb “stay” as a substitute for the verb “live” or for the verb “reside” is distinctly African-American.

The use apparently dates back to slavery in the U.S.

I wonder what other words are characteristic of various ethnicities in various languages around the world. If you have an example that you want me to share with other readers, please contact me.

“Mosquitoes” vs. “Mosquitos”

Foreign Languages, Nouns, Plurals, Versus

While recently investigating a system that daily sprays for this pest, my thoughts went to the the correct pluralization of the noun “mosquito”.

Problem:
It is not always clear how to pluralize a noun that ends with the letter “o”.

Explanation:
Years ago, U.S. Vice-President Dan Quayle became the butt of jokes when he told a student that the word “potato” should be spelled P-O-T-A-T-O-E.

The veep’s misspelling was likely due to the fact that the plural of “potato” — which is spelled P-O-T-A-T-O — is spelled P-O-T-A-T-O-E-S.

In other words, this singular noun with an “o” at the end is pluralized by adding E-S, not by adding only S.

Similarly, the singular noun “mosquito” — spelled M-O-S-Q-U-I-T-O — is pluralized in English by adding E-S instead of by adding S.

I believe that some American English speakers pluralize the singular noun “mosquito” by adding only an S because this is how the noun is pluralized in Spanish and because of the increasing influence of Spanish on American English

Solution:
Use “mosquitoes” with an O-E-S ending for English. Use “mosquitos” with an O-S ending for a language such as Spanish.

messiest, messier, messy, less messy, least messy

Adjectives, Outsider's Perspective

I heard someone say “messier” the other day, and it made me wonder about the various versions of the adjective “messy”.

We can say that X is “messy”.

We can compare X to something else and say that X is “messier” than the other.

We can compare X to everything else and say that X is “messiest”.

However, there are no modifiers of the adjective “messy” when going in the other direction.

Instead, we have:

  • X is “less messy” than something else.
  • X is the “least messy” of them all.

I find it interesting that modifiers of adjectives in English do not have this bidirectional symmetry.

I suspect that this asymmetry must give some native speakers of other languages difficulty when they are learning English.