Speech – Persuasive

The English language is broken. It is a mix and matched language pieced together with randomly selected parts of its ancestors. This is so much so that we get rules which contradict each other; words which sound or look the same as others but have completely different meanings; laws which work, only some of the time; and the list goes on.

Think of the word chuffed. Chuffed means delighted, pleased and satisfied, but it also means the complete opposite: annoyed, displeased and disgruntled. It carries two meanings behind it, how illogical is that! Imagine trying to learn a new language and finding out that a word means one thing but also the complete opposite of itself. It would be impossible to fathom. Imagine painting a piece of art and your mum says she’s so chuffed with it. You would expect that to mean that she loved it right? But what if she was just being super savage and hated it.

“I before e except after c.”  We have been taught this lie by the most trusted citizens of our society for generations. But sadly, our beloved teachers have been proved wrong. Results from a study done by UberFacts show that in the English language there are 923 words which break the I before e rule, and only 44 words that actually follow the rule. This means that that only 4.77% of the words related to the i before e rule actually follow it. This therefore entails that the English language is 95.23% broken.

Contractions make no sense. Think of the statement “Don’t you dare!” What you are really saying is “Do not you dare” Or “why cant you help me?” You are saying “why can not you help me” These statements have zero common sense and just do not work. I reckon if we brought Shakespeare back from the dead he would beat us up on the spot.

Another confusing, broken thing about the English language is the fact that words such as cough, though and through don’t rhyme even though they are spelled almost exactly the same. Whereas pony and Bologna words spelled utterly different, do rhyme. Imagine again how difficult it would be learning a new language. You would assume that words spelled the same, would be spoken the same! Or what about words like data, data; either, either; route, route which have different ways of saying them. Why not just have one way of saying them to save confusion?

This leads me on to how, since the English language is spoken in so many different countries, you get multiple different versions of the language. How difficult can that be for communication? I remember when we went to America for a holiday and we went to order some food, none of the Americans could understand my dad. Even though he was speaking the same language as them, they couldn’t understand him because of the different ways of saying things.

This is why i believe English is by far the most broken language in the world but, sadly, it is too late to do anything about this as it is also the most widely spoken language in the world. Which means there would be too many people opposed to the changes.

One Reply to “Speech – Persuasive”

  1. This is an excellent choice of topic, Billy! You might be interested in the way these two students have used a range of logical fallacies to manipulate their audience. Their task was to present some propaganda (so they chose to argue the opposite of the conventional side of an issue) and they didn’t nail the presentation side, but the construction of an argument (ab)using logic was excellent.

    http://lachlan.mtaspiring.edutronic.net
    http://james.dawson.mtaspiring.edutronic.net

    You can read more about logical fallacies here:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

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