The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth

The bells in Frère Jaques will forever chime ‘ding dang dong’. Every second your watch (or the grandfather clock in the hall makes the same sound) but we say tick-tock, never tock-tick. But we always, always say clip-clop, never clop-clip. You just wouldn’t know which one.Īll four of a horse’s feet make exactly the same sound. But if somebody said the words zag-zig, or ‘cross-criss you would know, deep down in your loins, that they were breaking a sacred rule of language. You are utterly familiar with the rule of ablaut reduplication. And it’s the same reason that you’ve never listened to hop-hip music. Well, in fact, the Big Bad Wolf is just obeying another great linguistic law that every native English speaker knows, but doesn’t know that they know. Why does Bad Big Wolf sound so very, very wrong? What happened to the rules? Little Red Riding Hood may be perfectly ordered, but the Big Bad Wolf seems to be breaking all the laws of linguistics. Second, you can spend the next hour of your life trying to think of exceptions, which is useful as it keeps you from doing something foolish like working.Īctually, there are a couple of small exceptions. And there’s the shock of realising that there’s a reason there may be little green men on Mars, but there certainly aren’t green little men.

We’re all quite a lot cleverer than we think we are. That’s rather peculiar, and rather exciting. First, it astonishes us that there are rules that we didn’t know that we knew.

English speakers love to learn this sort of thing for two reasons.

The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth