b. 17 Apr 1893 - PA
d. Mar 1984 - Huntingdon, PA

Juniata College, A.B., University of Michigan, M.A.

 If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?

Then one may be that, and three would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.

We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim!

  Let's face it - English is a crazy language!

There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;
neither apple nor pine in pineapple. 
English muffins weren't invented in England. 
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 nor 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?
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?

  If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? 

Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English
should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.

 In what other language do people recite at a play
and play at a recital?  We ship by truck but send cargo by ship. 
We have noses that run and feet that smell. 
We park in a driveway and drive in a parkway.
And 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.

  And, in closing, if Father is Pop, how come Mother's not Mop?
 

As someone mentioned recently in this newsletter, a casual mention of something can bring back some memories. So, many, many thanks
to Jean Poole Burton ('64) of RI for the "Ode to Plurals"!! I have been wanting to find that ever since taking first-year Latin.

Miss Free used to read that to her beginning Latin classes. She always taught us that Latin was an ordered language that followed fixed rules. After trying to drum that into our heads for our first three or four months, she would spring the "Ode to Plurals" on us out of the blue,
and that would really reinforce her point, showing us how insane English can be.

She had us in stitches, reading it to us in an obviously dramatic, over-acting fashion. I'm not sure now how much of our laughter was due
to the words of the ode, or how much due to her hamming things up a little, since that silliness seemed so out of character for her.
In any case, that lesson has stood the test of time!