English is a funny language

yet no one laughs. Ok, maybe some people do. One thing that irks me about it is if a word is mispronounced or misused long enough, it will change to make the wrong way correct. I think this promotes sloppiness. An example that comes to mind is 'forte'. The most common usage of the word means 'strength'. If your good at something, it's your forte. Forte used this way is pronounced 'fort' not 'fortay' which is an Italian musical term. Forte as most people use it, is French. Very few people pronounce it correctly. The last person I heard do so was Howie Long, an analyst foe Fox Sports. A lot of dictionaries will show the 'fortay' version since it's so commonly mispronounced they gave in so everyone doesn't look stupid.

Here's a goofy one. If you can you can keep something secret, do it without people knowing, you're discrete. If you try to sneak around and get caught, you're indiscrete. If you have a brain tumor that surgeons can safely remove, it's operable. If they can't safely remove it, it's inoperable. By the same token, if something catches fire easily, it's flammable. On the other hand, if it's inflammable, it can be easily set on fire...er..hey, wait a minute, are you nuts? 'In' is used to designate the opposite so whose idea was it to make flammable and inflammable mean the same thing? Is it any wonder people that move here from other countries have so much trouble learning English?

Then we have things like idioms, figures of speech, and the like. I'm a big fan of NCIS and there's a character from Israel, a Mossad agent, named Ziva who's always trying to fit in by using them, but always messes them up a bit which points out how silly most of them are in the first place. Things we say like 'there's more than one way to skin a cat'. Our poor foreign friend is still having trouble with flammable and inflammable and now they have to study the different methods of feline skinning and why the hell that's applicable to finding different routes to drive to work. It's raining cats and dogs, great, how am I going to explain those dents in my car to Geico? Let me give you a piece of my mind. Please, from listening to you the last few minutes, you've all ready given out way too much as it is. A lot of them don't make any sense and it's just by memorization that you understand what they mean. In most cases you really can't derive the meaning of them. Our speech is very colorful but it just makes it that much harder to learn.

Here's a little unrelated thing that isn't worth a separate entry (yeah, like this whole thing was, I know). Is there a convention for how long someone who's died is referred to as the late? Some presidents seem to keep 'the late' attached to their name for years. JFK maybe decades. I mean how long can someone be considered late before accepting the fact that they're just not ever going to show up.