Fun Facts about English (Part 1)

published on The Global Filipino Magazine website on 28 May 2023

English is like the Egyptian pyramids—full of mysteries, surprises, and less-heard-of areas. Although you wield it every day to get news, wade on social media, round out office task or school work, know the nutritional contents of food products, understand a medicine’s dose, imbibe a biblical lecture, and nail other undertakings beyond enumeration, you and I and anyone can never claim to have stepped on every corner of the English maze. Cracking the conundrums and headscratchers of this language, particularly those that slip past our nose every day, always brings us amazement and subconsciously embeds in our mind the precious knowledge acquired (not to mention poking it out as icebreaker in fam dinner and friends’ hangouts). English majors, linguists, and other enthusiasts of the language will certainly utter a resounding “Eureka!” upon hitting these precious gems. Let’s set sail to these unfamiliar corners of English and munch some trivia towards deepening our understanding of this ubiquitous language.

Let’s start off with the pronoun “you.” We all know that this second-person pronoun pertains to one or more people to whom we speak. Immersed in present-day English, especially that of the Americans, you probably just thought of a plural counterpart of this pronoun, didn’t you? That should be “y’all.”

“Y’all” is a new byword in daily interactions, a contracted form of “you all” in informal contexts to refer to two or more individuals with whom someone communicates. People see it as precise, effective, even emphatic reference to their listeners while being conscious of the latter’s number.

Linguists ascribe the massive rise of “y’all” to present-day speakers’ verbal inclination to inclusivity and gender sensitivity, where folks perceive it as a handy communicative tool to tell that the speaker does converse with more than one warm body, and a cautious word choice, not conforming with the traditional masculinity whenever a person in general is meant. Indeed, as language mavens say, this is where “you guys” lag behind in its race against “y’all”: “you guys” is likewise a fad in innovatively replacing plural “you,” but it’s downside is that it leans towards masculinity. Ergo, gender-cautious speakers tend to drop it, welcoming “y’all” to get into their tongues.

Let’s run through some of the myriad occurrences of “y’all” in people’s expressions. First, iconic talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres enlisted “y’all” during her interview with Taylor Swift in May 2019. Looking at Swift’s new music video, DeGeneres expressed her compliment on Swift-Brendon Urie tandem in the video by saying, “I love that y’all were together in that.” The second one is veteran actor Kirsten Dunst’s note in August 2019 on the audience’s impression as to her acting. During her interview in “In-Depth with Larry Flick,” Dunst—who played the romantic-interest character “Mary Jane Watson” in Spider-man (2002), Spider-man 2 (2004), and Spider-man 3 (2007)—explained, “Well, remember when Marie Antoinette . . . y’all panned it?” Another “y’all” appearance we have here is from then United States (U.S.) president Barack Obama during his remarks at the Phoenix Awards Dinner of Congressional Black Caucus Foundation in September 2011. Sympathizing with people in their struggle to keep a tenable life for future generations, Obama soothed, “I know. I listen to some of y’all.” When he was still a president-elect in January 2009, he also had cracked a kudo joke about his really spicy meal from a downtown resto in Washington, D.C. “Y’all have some Pepto Bismol . . . ?” said the cool American statesman. Incumbent U.S. president Joe Biden (a presidential election candidate at the time) also referred to his listener, the American Federation of Teachers, in July 2020 using “y’all” when he said, “You know me: there’s a lot more I want to say to y’all, but there’s so much you’ve done already.”

Spotting “y’all” in conversations, especially in informal chats, is pretty easy. It continues to gain steam in English language production nowadays, perhaps gearing up to oust “you” in denoting two or more listeners. Who knows, “y’all” may be formally recognized and get into standard English in the future, by which grammar books will insert it in the pronouns list alongside the original English pronouns. Well, that just brings quiver. The inclusion thing.

The second nicety concerns parts of speech. Do you know that the eight parts of speech in English are classified in two ways, the open class and closed class? The parts of speech belonging to the open class are readily susceptible to words as new members. These parts of speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and interjection (some references don’t include interjection in this category, but I advertently put it here as we make utterances depending on our mood, emotion, and psyche [e.g., hmm, whee, argh, ew, oops, phew, aha, whoa]). For example, noun, the fastest growing word group, expands rapidly as new names are formed every day. These words can be the name of a new convenience store nearby, a recently introduced mobile phone, and a fresh movie in the cinema. Just any name people use. The same is true for verbs: as nouns sprout in remarkable speed, so do verbs. People convert nouns into verbs to refer to an action germane to the thing denoted by the noun. Examples are “google,” “tweet,” “air drop,” and “xerox.” Google is the name of one of the online engines that allow you to search for information across the Internet. When someone tells you “to google” the procedure of T-shirt tie-dyeing, he simply asks you to search for the procedure online, often through the Google search engine. On the contrary, the parts of speech belonging to the closed class do not easily admit new words to join the group. These parts of speech are conjunction, preposition, and pronoun. For example, you cannot easily coin a new conjunction to connect two or more sentence elements, and you’ll probably choose between “and” and “or” among other conjunctions in English to convey your meaning. The same is true for pronouns. This is one of the rudimentary reasons why giving “y’all” a comfortable seat in standard English is distasteful, not to mention its informality.

Another interesting fact about English deals with the word “graduate.” Asked about where you earned your undergraduate degree, you’ll spontaneously reply, “I graduated from Arizona State University” or whatever that school was. Little do people know that the word “graduate” doesn’t traditionally work this way. It’s originally used as a transitive verb to say that someone confers an academic degree upon another, as in “Kyiv National Economic University graduated Volodymyr Zelensky in 2000” and “In 1999, University of Pennsylvania graduated John Legend with magna cum laude honor.” Converted into passive form, these sentences come “Volodymyr Zelensky was graduated (by Kyiv National Economic University) in 2000” and “In 1999, John Legend was graduated (by University of Pennsylvania) with magna cum laude honor,” where the parenthetical phrases are optional sentence constituents.

Action verbs are either transitive or intransitive. On the one hand, transitive verbs require a direct object to complete their meaning. A direct object is a basic sentence component in the form of a noun or pronoun that receives the action signified by the verb. In the two active sentences above, “Volodymyr Zelenskyy” and “John Legend” are the direct objects of the verb “graduate.” On the other hand, intransitive verbs stand without the accompaniment of a direct object, as in “Megan sneezes from dust” (or just “Megan sneezes”) and “Our neighbor’s dog barks at the mailman” (or mere “Our neighbor’s dog barks”).

The action verb “graduate” originally operates in the transitive sense. Nowadays, employing it that way sounds unusual, even strange as it is instinctively used in the intransitive manner.

Relative to our next trivia piece, when I first heard of “uppercase” and “lowercase” letter in English, I didn’t sense anything interesting and just took them for granted. I quickly assumed that “uppercase” was a term to denote the capitalized form of a letter in writing—a form that is superior and literally bigger, and used to signify special, sometimes important meanings such as the specific name of a person, place, or thing and to mark the beginning of a sentence. As to “lowercase,” I dismissed it as the common, default presentation of letters and words in writing. Is this experience similar to yours?

It’s quite amusing to know that these terms involve two literal cases, that is, storage objects, one situated in an upper position and the other in a lower situs. Historians explain that before the dawn of automatic printing press, compositors (the people operating the printing press; also called “typesetters”) manually arranged types (thin sheets of metals on which letters were embossed) in a frame to resemble the desired page. When not in use, these types were kept in two cases, one for the capital letters and the other for the small ones. The two cases were usually placed atop a table. Because small letters constituted sentences more than the capital letters did, the case holding the small letters was placed completely lying on the table—the position where it’s closer to the compositor, thereby, easier to reach. Conversely, since capital letters didn’t come out in sentences as frequent as small letters did, the case containing the capital letters was placed on the table in a leaning position, immediately above the small-letter case—a location where it’s a bit farther from the printing staffer compared with the small-letter case. The placement of these cases explains the terms “lowercase” and “uppercase”: small letters were kept in a case of lower position, hence, the “lowercase” letters, whilst capital letters were stored in a case of upper location, hence, the “uppercase” letters. Eureka!

Do you know that there are two schools of thought in the study of English grammar? They are not flat-out contradictory to each other; they just stand not on the same surface with regard to seeing how grammar goes. Fun fact number five concerns the two classifications of English grammar, the prescriptive grammar and descriptive grammar.

What you often hear from people’s utterances is not necessarily grammatical. “What’s this medicine for?” “Where did you come from?” “I know how to easily cook lasagna,” “The vice president spoke to the crowd to further know the public’s sentiments.” They sound natural, yeah? Very much, I know. But nah. All are wrong. In the eyes of prescriptive grammar.

Prescriptive grammar holds that English-language production must be governed by grammatical rules for proper use. Simply put, there are definite structural rules to employ the language formally, precisely, and correctly. These rules, which were laid down by linguists and native speakers of English, encompass affixation, capitalization, collocation, arrangement of words, and modification of words, to name a few. Some of the rules resulted from the settlement of linguistic disputes centuries ago, where grammarians addressed conflicting opinions about propriety in a certain grammatical area through reasoning and applying the rudiments of English grammar.

The first two sentences above, “What’s this medicine for?” and “Where did you come from?” are examples of prepositional stranding—a basic no-no in prescriptive grammar. Prepositions, similar to conjunctions, are words signifying relationship. A preposition, in particular, tells about the relationship of a noun or pronoun with another sentence constituent. That noun or pronoun is often called the object of the preposition. In layman’s terms, the preposition exists to connect its object to some other word in the sentence. Accordingly, leaving a preposition hanging, that is, without any object beside it to connect, makes nothing more than a bridge sans the other end. This makes prepositional stranding illogical. Another reason against prepositional stranding may be derived from the object of the preposition per se. Some grammarians call the object of the preposition the object complement. This means that the noun or pronoun itself completes the meaning of the preposition towards forming a prepositional phrase. Ergo, to relocate the object complement in the sentence is grammatically erroneous.

The third and fourth utterance above, “I know how to easily cook lasagna” and “The vice president spoke to the crowd to further know the public’s sentiments” exemplify another forbidden construction in prescriptive grammar—split “to”-infinitives. A “to”-infinitive is a two-word combination headed by preposition “to” followed by a verb in base form. In the given sentences, these are “to cook” and “to know.” Prescriptive grammar advises not to rift the “holding hands” of “to”-infinitives. Across linguistic literature, I found that the rule emanated from linguists’ and native speaker’s judgment on the propriety of using “to”-infinitives; that a “to”-infinitive is a single grammatical unit, thereby must stick together; and upholding Latin grammar, where disjointing “to”-infinitives is not a grammatical possibility (because a Latin “to”-infinitive is one word, such as “scribere” [to write], “docere” [to teach], “amare” [to love]).

Although it carries a verb, a “to”-infinitive functions not as verb in sentences. It’s a grammatical unit functioning as noun (e.g., “to study” in “The commonplace solution to poverty is to study”), adjective (e.g., “to learn” in “English syntax is an intricate subject to learn”), or adverb (e.g., “to earn” in “Everyone breaks his back to earn”).

Examples of prescriptive grammar rules in addition to the two discussed above are preference for “much thanks” over “many thanks”; incomparability of “unique” and “perfect” (“more unique” and “most perfect” don’t exist); not beginning a sentence with “And,” “But,” and “However”; preference for “different from” over “different to” and “different than”; avoidance of double negatives to mean negation; use of “shall” when the subject is a first-person pronoun (i.e., “I” and “we”) and “will” for all other pronouns and nouns in telling about futurity; avoidance of “like” in giving examples (“English is the second language in many Asian countries like India, Singapore, and Malaysia” is wrong); use of “were” in constructing past-subjunctive sentences having the verb “be” regardless of the subject’s number (e.g., “If Laura were here, we could solve this complex algebra,” “Claire commands the team as if she were the boss”); and preference for the nominative first-person and third-person pronoun when the pronoun is used as subject complement (e.g., “The culprit was he,” “The author is I”).

If prescriptive grammar is interested at the rules of formal, precise, standard English-language use, descriptive grammar delves into the manner language users employ English. Specifically, descriptive grammar identifies and codifies the grammatical features employed by the language users. Descriptivists do this by examining a bunch of materials reflecting authentic language use such as newspapers, magazines, correspondence, recorded oral conversations, and speeches, among others. Some of the grammatical rules documented by descriptive grammar were those abhorred by prescriptive grammar, such as prepositional stranding; objective-case pronouns as subject complement; and “was” in place of “were” in past-subjunctive sentences as in “If I was you, I would step out the car.” Other descriptive grammar rules are, among others, existence of “irregardless of”; pluralizing “research,” that is, “researches”; and use of objective-case pronouns in comparative sentences such as “Ron is taller than me” (standard is “Ron is taller than I).

Tune in for the second part of “Fun Facts about English,” where I shall lay down to you more fascinating information about this magnificent language. Things that you just take for granted without a sill of interest on how and where on Earth did these linguistic matters pop up. I assure you that all the deets discussed above are just a modicum of the English trivia. See yah!