Words are fascinating.
Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve loved language. My first word was ‘stuck,’ and I was reading by the time I was two. When it was time for me to start kindergarten, my mom decided to enrol me in French Immersion, because I’d already been reading novels in English – and voicing my frustration about all the grammatical and spelling errors within them.
As much as I love language, it doesn’t always make sense to me. I have a very logical, literal mind. And I like it when things are consistent. But… words aren’t really very consistent.
Case in point: when something was glowing last night, it ‘glowed.’ But if I saw someone throwing a baseball on Saturday, they ‘threw’ it. Kids often say ‘throwed,’ and are corrected for their misuse of language, but why is that wrong? Generally, it’s safe to assume that by adding ‘ed’ to a word, you can indicate past tense. However, when it comes to language, there are always exceptions.
A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine used the word ‘glew’ to describe something that had been glowing, and then immediately looked at me and said, “is that even a word?”
“No,” I told him, laughing. “It’s a word if it’s ‘glue,’ but that’s not what you’re trying to say.”
So, because I generally like to spend time with people who are smart and like learning, we started investigating. He brought up several examples of words that back up his use of ‘glew,’ including ‘threw,’ ‘blew,’ and ‘grew.’ And with a bit of research, we discovered that these words were used, at one time. According to the Internet, ‘glew’ is an Old English word and is still used in some parts of the United Kingdom, however infrequently.
The other day, he watched Hamlet. I got a text message containing a direct quote from Shakespeare’s play, “it was about to speak when the cock crew.” Sparknotes offers a ‘modern text’ translation: It was about to say something when the rooster crowed.
Ignoring the part where modern people for some reason might not understand that ‘speak’ means ‘say something,’ you can see that modern English uses ‘crowed’ instead of ‘crew,’ and that obviously, saying ‘glew’ would have made sense at one time.
Really, the English language is constantly evolving – which comes with both benefits and drawbacks, I think. Lazy pronunciation means people say things like ‘comfterble’ and ‘chawk’ and soon enough, those will probably replace ‘comfortable’ and ‘chalk’ as actual words. And sometimes I feel like I’m the only person who pronounces the letter T in words like ‘button’ or ‘kitten.’
And new words are invented all the time. A quick browse through the list of words added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2014 includes not only painful entries like ‘bestie’ and ‘DIYer,’ but also ‘wackadoo’ and ‘scissor-kick.’ I really needed scissor-kick to be a real word.
I’m trying to bring it back, because using Old English in modern-day is obviously the cool thing to do. However, I don’t really have a lot of opportunities to use it in everyday sentences. According to my friend, though, ‘glew’ has a slightly different meaning than ‘glowed.’
Much to the disappointment of my friend’s roommate, though, ‘jamp’ doesn’t seem to have any basis in reality.
“You didn’t runned, you ran!” he protests. “So you didn’t jumped, you jamp!”
Try as I might, I’ve yet to find any history to back up the use of that word, even if it might make logical sense.
But that’s the thing about language – it’s definitely not always based on logic.
