funny you should say that

"the right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.” - mark twain

so a kid i know pointed out an anomaly of the english language to me the other day. how sometimes words placed consecutively one after the other can possess one meaning but often take on an entirely unique meaning when those same words are treated as individual terms. the example she offered up was the phrase "awfully nice" which obviously holds one connotation when the terms are considered in tandem but suggests something much different when the terms are considered separate and apart.

which got me to thinking about all sorts of other odd little idiosyncrasies found within my native tongue. words and expressions and pronunciations that give me pause for thought. that make me wonder how they ever ended up as part of my local dialect in the first place.

like the never-ending debate surrounding the use of the queries "may i" and "can i" which seems to torment school-age children everywhere, especially those seeking the nod from their teachers before paying a visit to the nearest facilities.

or the fact that consonant pairs like "gh" can possess one sound at the beginning of a word ("ghost") but two entirely different sounds at the end of a word ("rough" and "though").

or the utter reliance of some folks on so-called cheat words like "um" and "uh" and "like" and "you know." words that express absolutely no meaning whatsoever and yet seem to persist as an almost indispensable component of our everyday discourse.

why, it's enough to make a linguistics ph.d. candidate cringe.

way to work that jumpsuit, jean-marc