When I was 14 I had a Science teacher named Mr. Brown. He was your typical mad scientist - and yet as stern as could be. As a teacher he was a total control freak! On top of it all he spoke with such a thick Scottish accent that it was sometimes hard to understand what he was saying. We all called him "Ma Brun".
On one particular day my English teacher was away sick, so Mr. Brown took us for English. To this day I have no idea why. He even had the class relocate to his science lab. We were discussing the English language - its size, parts thereof and so on. One question he asked was, "How big is English? How many words do you think there are?" Some kids said 10,000, 100,000 or maybe more, and Mr. Brown just kept telling them they were wrong. I suggested that English really is infinite. New words are being invented and used every day; words that didn't exist years ago, or even yesterday. It’s a growing, moving, changing language.
I was so berated by Mr. Brown that at the end of the lesson I left the classroom virtually in tears. I thought my answer may have appealed to his scientific mindset. Evidently not.
Ma Brun went on to tell us how stupid we all were. He guessed that there were about 50 million (or some such number) words in the English language, and that we probably only knew a few hundred thousand.
TC&GB, pk
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