'If its too loud, your to old' and other sins against English

I was driving down the road the other day and saw a bumper sticker on a truck. Well, it was on the back window but I think it’s still called a bumper sticker and I could have called it a window sticker but then there would be no way for you to know that it's on a car. Anyway, the sticker said, make that read, “If its too loud, your to old.” There are more than a few things wrong with that sentence and I found three errors in a total of seven words and one of the words is spelled correctly the first time and spelled incorrectly the second time. 

Not everything needs to have a proofreader scrutinize it, but anyone with more than two brain cells should have realized that the sticker had some serious issues. I thought the person who created the sticker was the problem, but there must have been a few desks the bumper sticker crossed before it went into production. I imagine bumper sticker companies must have a writer, a proofreader, an editor, and a typesetter. Someone should have noticed but maybe it’s not a people problem. What if language was to blame.

English is the oblong golf ball on the eighteenth hole of languages.
Slang aside, English is more confusing than Father’s Day on the Maury Povich show. Between the their, they’re, and there's and two, two, and tos, English is riddled with a milanthropy of pertubius dalliances which subjugate the very fortitude of insurgent communication. I understand that different languages can have their own little nuances, but English seems to have the same architect as the platypus, Zima marketing, and Charlie Sheen’s brain to mouth filter.

When I was in grade school, I was taught that you put an s at the end of a word when you want to change it from singular to plural. Although I hadn’t learned what singular or plural was, I believed that life could be that simple; little did I know, things were about to get so much more complicated.

Three geese is not geeses and more than one mouse is not meese or mouses but mice. A pair of mooses is moose and one moose is a moose. More than one house is houses and not hice.  If something is done one time it is once, two times it is twice, three times is thrice, but four times is not fice or fource; it is four times and five times and six times.

You can have a pairs of boots but not a pair of foots to go in them. Toe goes to toes and shoe become shoes and boo shifts to boos.

The plural of box is boxes so more than one ox should be oxes? Two cactuses is cacti which is shorter than the original word. Bacteria is the plural yet bacterium is singular. It doesn’t make sense that the less there is of something, the longer the word to describe it; radii is plural for radius and nuclei for nucleus and media for medium and alumni for alumnus. The list goes on and on.

Sheep remains sheep and fish are fish as is series and species and pants and shorts and eyeglasses. Eyeglasses is both eyeglasses and a pair of eyeglasses and scissors and shorts follow the same rule.  

Short should be singular for shorts just for efficiency of language. If there is a pair of shorts on the bed, you should be able to say there is a short on the bed or a pant and save shorts and pants for when there are many. And why are they called a pair of shorts/pants when there’s only one?

Prince is singular and princes is plural but if you add another s it becomes the singular princess and add an es and it becomes the plural princesses unless you decide to take it to another level and make it plural possessive. 

The plural of hair is hair. The plural of person is people unless we’re talking about a human being regarded as an individual; then we use persons as in persons unknown. Wolf is wolves and not wolfs which makes more sense. Wharf is the same as it transforms like a butterfly into the more elegant wharves.

The plural or thief is thieves and the plural of aircraft is aircraft and deer mysteriously morphs into deer. I guess context is key in determining if it’s singular or plural. One would say there is an aircraft on the runway for singular as opposed to there is aircraft on the runway, but why not just say aircrafts or just simply make the plural of aircraft, planes. You could say there is many much deer in the field to denote more than one. Datum is singular and data is plural but you wouldn’t even use datum unless you’re Frasier Crane; I use data for both.

The plural of hippopotamus is hippopotami or hippopotamuses even though I just call them hippos. More than one tooth is not tooths but teeth so more than one booth should be beeth? The plural of man is men but the plural of pan is pans when it should be pen. English doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I turn red when I read (rhymes with deed) what’s already been read (rhymes with dead).

More than one die is dice yet a person who is dead, dies. The plural of bush is bushes and not bushs as is ass and church and pass and quiz. Potatoes is the plural so why isn’t the singular potatoe Mr. Quayle? But photo transforms to photos and not photoes and piano isn’t pianoes.

I had to pay a fare to get in the fair which was not fair. Child is singular and childs is plural? Don’t be silly; it’s children which must mean that the plural of kid must be kidren.

Bow and bough sound the same but aren’t. Tough should sound the same but there’s also through which sounds like threw. Bomb and tomb and comb are spelled the same but don’t sound the alike; some and numb sound similar but aren’t spelled the same as are home and poem. Come and home don’t sound alike but home and roam and comb and, of course, poem do; there are four spelling for the same sound: he had to roam around his home to find the poem which was under the comb.

He and the flightless dove drove at the man who wouldn’t move.

Byte, bite, and bight sound the same but are all spelled differently as are sense/cents/scents and err/heir/air. There is isle, aisle, and I’ll and they get more confusing if you use them in the same sentence:

I’ll go down the aisle on the isle.

and

He didn’t have enough sense to know that it costs more than a few cents to buy scents.

Maybe the words I’ve been looking at are too long and the length is gumming up the process. I went from the complicated words to the more simple two letter words too. The first was to, from an earlier example. I compared it with the word so; they’re spelled the same but sound different. And so sounds like mow and foe which it doesn’t resemble, and sew and sow too. Every time I think I’ve answered one more question, three more replace it and I fall down the wordsmith hole homophones first.

One of the first words I ever learned was no. It’s short, to the point, and sounds as it should. The word know sounds exactly the same yet is twice as long. If no gets the point across so effectively, why do we need an additional word? I didn’t no enough information to be able to say know. One can say they are two different words with separate meaning but then why do we have other words like read/read and bass/bass which both are the same words with two meanings.

A fish is a bass and a musical instrument is a bass which sounds just like base or lace but not like the fish. I shed a tear when my new shorts had a tear. She grabbed a pair of pears for her lunch. At the zoo, the bear pen was bare and it was more than he could bare. Which witch switched the switchblade?

I found myself going in circles and asking questions like what’s the plural of the word singular? And what is the singular of plural? Or is plural the singular? English has its peccadilloes and I can keep this going forever. Their has two bee an and too this column sew aisle rap it up hear. English is stalled on the side of the road of the language highway and in need of some serious repairs; I can’t do it alone.  I’ve been told a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. For now, I’ve gone back to basics and changed the name of John Steinbeck’s famous novel to Of Mouses and Mans.