I Read Too Many English Language Tweets and Now Every Single Word Looks Made Up

My favorite people on the internet are the ones who read a word slower than it was meant to be read, the way you’d read a contract from a guy named Lucky. Half the best english language jokes aren’t jokes at all, they’re bug reports filed against the dictionary, which, by the way, contains the word dictionary. Oversee and overlook were built from the exact same parts and still grew up to be enemies. Somebody approved that, and I would like a name.

Then there’s spelling, which I’ve always suspected was designed by someone who got paid by the letter. I once misspelled restaurant on a birthday card, and that card is still out there somewhere, judging me. Good grammar memes go after the silent letters, the ones that show up, get paid, and contribute nothing, like a cousin on moving day. Some words even turn out to be tiny drawings of themselves, and now I can’t look at a shark the same way, mostly because I’ve never looked at a shark.

And some people take everyday phrases completely literally, which is the fastest way to discover that English is a little filthy. A few of these go places the grandparents would not approve of, although one grandparent clearly got there first, by accident, over the phone. That’s what good wordplay humor does: it takes a phrase you’ve said a thousand times and asks what it actually means, out loud, at the worst possible moment. Shipments go by car, cargo goes by ship, and I have decided to stop asking questions at the post office.

I think people share these because English is the one thing we all use every single day and never got to vote on. You learn it as a kid, before you have any leverage, and by the time you’re old enough to object it’s too late, you’re already writing emails. So when a stranger points out that palindrome isn’t a palindrome, it feels like justice. Finally, somebody filed the complaint.

There’s something sweet underneath it, too. Every one of these came from a person who was supposed to be asleep, or working, or listening to someone, and instead got distracted by a word, which might be the most human hobby there is. I do it constantly; I once said the word spoon until my roommate left the room. Language is a group project we all inherited halfway through the semester, and the least we can do is laugh at the parts nobody finished.

The letters are silent. The questions are loud. The dictionary is in the dictionary.