amuse me

This is why I love English

We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the  plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are  called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may  find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is  houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is  always called men,
Why shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen?
If I  speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair  be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why  shouldn’t the plural of booth be called beeth?

  Then one may be that, and  there would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
And the  plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of  brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the  masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis  and shim!

Let’s face it  - English is a crazy  language.
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in  hamburger;
Neither apple nor pine in  pineapple.
English muffins weren’t invented in  England.

We  take English for  granted, but if we explore its paradoxes,
We find that quicksand can work  slowly, boxing rings are square,
And a guinea pig is neither from  Guinea nor is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write, but fingers don’t  fing,
Grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham?

Doesn’t it seem crazy that  you can make amends but not one amend?
If you have a bunch of odds and ends  and get rid of all but one of them,
What do you call  it?

 If teachers taught, why  didn’t preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does  a humanitarian eat?

Sometimes I think all the  folks who grew up speaking English

Should be committed to an  asylum for the verbally insane.
In what other language do people recite at  a play and play at a recital?

We ship by truck but send  cargo by ship…
We have noses that run and feet that smell.
We park in  a driveway and drive in a parkway.
And how can a slim chance and a fat  chance be the same,
While a wise man and a wise guy are  opposites?

You have to marvel at the  unique lunacy of a language
In which your house can burn up as it burns  down,
In which you fill in a form by filling it out,
And in which an  alarm goes off by going on.

                                                     And in closing……….

If Father is Pop, how come Mother’s not  Mop?