1peH@
1peH
: 2007-11-16 15:48:19 UTC+0000
ini ada artikel ttg bahasa inggris daris ebuah forum. Yang membuatku terkesan itu karena pengarangnya bisa mengarang kalimat dgn "up" berkali2. Bagi yang sdh pernah membaca sebelumnya, ya lwat saja. Biarkan yang belum baca membacanya.
YOU THINK ENGLISH IS EASY??
Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant, no ham in hamburger, neither apple no pine in pineapple.
English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France.
Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbread, which aren't sweet, are meat.
We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work SLOWLY, boxing rings are SQUARE and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea not is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing?
Grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth, beeth??
One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend?
If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?
How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?
You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out? And in which an alarm goes off by going on?
There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that is "UP".
It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP? At the meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do we speak UP and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report?
We call UP our friends. And we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver; warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car. At other times the littel word has real special meaning.
People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses. To be addresse is one thing but to be dresses UP is special.
And this UP is confusing:
A drain must be opened UP because it stopped UP. We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night.
We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP!! To eb knowledgeable about the proper use of UP, look the word UP in the dictionary. In a desk-size dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4th of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions.
If you are UP to it, you might try building UP alist of the many ways UP is used.
It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred more.
When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP. When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP.
When it rains, it wets the arth and often messes things UP. When it doesn't rain for a while, things dry UP.
We could go on, but I will wrap it UP, for now my time is UP, so......Time to shut UP!