Language

Languishing Language

We can poke fun at the words used by different professions, like the military calling some of its public servants privates.  But the house of the language experts isn’t exactly in perfect order either.  Consider these questions:

Why isn’t phonetic spelled the way it sounds?

How come the word abbreviation is so long?

Wouldn’t the opposite of abbreviate be breviate?

What’s another word for thesaurus?

Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to call a dictionary a definitionary?

Would anyone ever look up the word dictionary in the dictionary?

Is there something spellbinding about dictionaries?

Why is it that definitions are seldom definitive?

How come there is no verb form of the word verb?

Since pronoun is a noun, why isn’t proverb a verb?

Can you recite a list of nouns verbatim?

Do verbose people ever use nouns?

Would “buy” and “try” be good adverbs?

Do this sentence need reverberation?

Doesn’t the word syntax sound rather more political than scholarly?

How come there is no anagram for anagram?

Why doesn’t the word umlaut have one?

Wouldn’t analogy be a good synonym for proctology?

Why didn’t they call a palindrome something like a palinilap or emordrome?

Does onomatopoeia sound anything like it means?

Wouldn’t you say most novels are not?

What’s the word for when you can’t think of the word?

Why isn’t lisp pronounced lithp?

Why is number abbreviated as “no” when there is no “o”?

Why is phraseology only one word?

Shouldn’t there be a shorter word for monosyllabic?

What is the opposite of opposite?

Who coined the phrase “coined the phrase?”

Why isn’t acronym an acronym of something?

Isn’t dyslexic really spelled cixelsyd?

Is slang short for “sloppy language?”

Why do they call the thing at the end of sentence a period instead of a dot?