English is dumb…

Yesterday, I received a text on the Text the Times hotline.

In that text, I received the trifecta of grammatical gaffes.

It contained this phrase… “Their going to come after you’re guns to.” Hopefully, you noticed that the sentence should have read, “They’re going to come after your guns too.” Now, I’m no Grammar Nazi, but we do try to use the proper form of a word when putting it in the newspaper.

It did get me to thinking, though, of how confusing the English language is. We have a lot of words that sound exactly the same but have totally different meanings, like sun and son, dear and deer, or read and reed (or even read and red… ugh). What’s even worse is the spelling. Like why is through not spelled thru or throo? You know what’s even dumber? Through and rough don’t rhyme.

And neither of them rhyme with though… or bough.

I know I’m not the first to make this observation. I remember the comedian Gallagher (the guy with the mallet and the watermelons) doing a routine that went something along the lines of pointing out that comb, bomb and tomb not only don’t rhyme… they don’t even need the B on the end!

So, I’m not going to give Mr. Texter a hard time about his errors. We’ve been screwing up there-their-they’re, too-to, and your-you’re for centuries at this point. I can’t even imagine being a non-English speaker trying to learn the language. I took two years of French and that was bad enough, what with all the conjugations and masculine and feminine nouns.

Maybe we should all bring back Latin?