Wednesday, December 06, 2006

English anomaly of the day

I propose to find anomalous practices in the English language and its local mongrel daughter Taglish and post them here as soon as I find them.

1) Which is correct: 'Keep this door open' or 'Keep this door opened.'? Most of the people I asked chose the first, and so would I. Except we say, for apparently no reason at all, 'Keep this door closed.' There is no logical reason we would use a present tense form of the adjectival verb for one, and the past tense form for its opposite. The closest I could come up with is the need to prevent ambiguity between keeping a door shut and keeping a door near, which both use 'close' hence the need to distinguish keeping the door shut by using 'closed.' But that isnt satisfactory. Only a moron would misconstrue nearness with shut-ness. Therefore I will from this day on use 'Keep this door opened' until this anomaly is satisfactorily resolved.

2) The Tagalog prefix 'na-' is used to denote that an action has occured in the past, much like -d or -ed is used to denote simple past perfect tense in English: Open, Opened; Close, Closed. Therefore, if one uses na- in Taglish, one doesnt need to use the past tense form in the English part of the word or phrase. 'nabore' for bored, 'nabring up' for brought up, 'naforesee' for foresaw, etc. However, in common Taglish usage, one uses, again for no logical reason at all to connote being fed up, the Taglish word 'nafed up.' This is anomalous. Therefore, unless anybody defends the usage of nafed up to me, I will use the more correct nafeed up.

I will try to unearth more anomalies and post them here as they come to me. In the meantime, I enjoin you to use the more correct forms until the issue is satisfactorily resolved. Sure theyll laugh at you, but I ask you, didnt they laugh at Magellan when he proposed to circumnavigate the globe? Didnt they laugh at Copernicus when he proposed that the Earth revolved around the sun? They can laugh at you, but it will be the laughter of the dunces against pure, unadulterated genius. Join me. Let's carve up a little corner of sanity in this wild and crazy world. Keep your minds opened.

Addendum (8 December): It has occured to me that the reason we use nafed up is because there is no infinitive 'to feed up' in English. The infinitive is actually 'to get fed up' (got fed up, getting fed up, will get fed up). Therefore the correct Taglish usage should be naget fed up, and this is the form I will be using henceforth in more formal conversation. Nafed up is acceptable in less formal situations.

1 comment:

grifter said...

if our minds are opened, then that means we are being lobotomized.