Why Can’t the Americans Learn To Speak English?

You think a Foreign language might be difficult to learn?  Think how hard it would be to try to speak or understand English.  First off, there are many words which are spelled the same way, or worse, have the same sound; but have different meanings or spellings.…For examples: The word REIGN  is pronounced “RAIN”…Meaning:  The period during which a sovereign rules: i.e., the original chapel was built in the reign of Charles I.  …& “The New White House Ballroom is being built during the reign of President Trump. From: Middle English…Old French… Or White House Salad Speak. 

Or, the word REIN… Pronounced “RAIN”. Meaning: the power to direct and control, as in “No one has pulled a rein on President Trump…not the Supreme Court, not Congress, not you, nor I…Middle English, old French, Latin… American Nasty Press speak.

Or, RAIN…   Pronounced “RAIN”. Meaning: moisture condensed from the atmosphere that falls in separate drops: Or, metaphorically: The pardons being auto-signed by President Trump are covering the country like drops of Acid Rain spewing from Polluted Clouds from above.   Old English…German…Nasty Press Speak

To complicate matters further: Red, for example, can be a color. Or, it can sound as if you just read (pronounced “red”) something. Or just Read (reed) something. Oh, and “reed” could mean: a tall, slender-leaved plant of the grass family, which grows in water or on marshy ground.” …So who’s to know if you are speaking of color, something in a book, or if you did it in the present or past tense? Red can also be a political color …and is often the color of the cape they wave at a raging Bull.

Did you know, “KNOW” means to have knowledge of and “NO” means “not any”? If this makes SENSE, then so be it.  Of course there is:  SENSE (dealing with Sanity, smells and such) &  CENTS (dealing with coined money) & and SENTS (dealing with the plurality of emails sent out…like the ones I sent to my Congressmen about how the current Admin is not making any sense.)

And then there Pronunciations from people of different English speaking lands,…”What the F#$%” is an ‘Expletive’ to Americans, but to an Englishman it is  an “Expleeetive”.…Have you ever tried to understand a word a Scot has to utter?…The Aussies,  the Irish, the Welsh…it goes on and on…

And then there is “ROOF. (Sounds like: “Rufe” or ‘Ruff” in different regions…and Bury, as in “Bury the dead” (pronounced “Berry” or “Bury” – depending…)

No wonder no one can make sense of what the American President is trying to say. He is speaking to everybody, using bad or wrong words  and everybody whose listening thinks he must be saying something else or is mispronouncing words because he is so tired from texting and playing golf or else it would make sense because he is such a good businessman – if you take my meaning. 

 I’ll end it here and go back to my Italian lessons, even with all their verbs irregular and tenses…speaking of  Tenses…Did you know, we Americans speak mostly in the Present Tense? What we do is, instead of speaking with a Future Tense, we set the stage with “Tomorrow, I go to the game and cheer.”  …and instead of using the Past Tense, we say “Yesterday…I am at the game and have some beers, ” It is an action- packed form of speaking…But remember Tense, Tents and Tense…can be problematic…T ENT S meaning where hundreds of thousands of Americans are living in – due to the  economic situation…or TENSE, meaning the situation with all these people living in tents is getting tense and all of this is in the present TENSE.  Do you get my meaning?

Vai! Alora, Va Bene!

C. E. Metzger

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