Thursday, February 28, 2008

English annoys me

flamible and immflamible
fraud and defraud
pantsed and depantsed

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Or that you park on a driveway and drive on a parkway?

Or when your house goes up in flames in order to burn down to the ground?

Steven Pinker gave a great lecture about this (and, incidentally, the neurological purpose of swearing) at Town Hall a couple of months ago. Though they seem redundant and contradictory, the nuances of grammatical usage make them semantically distinct... it was really awesome.

Man, I'm such a geek.

rbbergstrom said...

Town Hall?

Anonymous said...

Town Hall:

http://www.townhallseattle.org/

I think he was promoting his new book. I didn't buy it, but The Language Instinct is pretty good.