THERE is a particular kind of person who lives for the moment you write “it’s” instead of “its”.
You can feel them coil before they strike, red pen practically vibrating, ready to inform you – kindly, of course, always kindly – that you’ve made an error.
It’s a small thrill for them.
A tiny courtroom where they are, for once, unimpeachably right, and you are, for once, the defendant who didn’t know they’d been charged. I used to take this seriously.
Grammar felt like a moral position, and the people enforcing it seemed to be holding the line against chaos.
Then I sat with my kids while they learned to read English, and realised the joke was on all of us.
The kids weren’t failing to understand the rules.
The rules were failing to make sense and doing it with a straight face.
A language that’s been drinking
My daughter once asked why “should” has a silent “l” if “would” also has one but nobody bothers saying it out loud.
I told her the truth: English made a promise it stopped keeping and never told anyone.
She wasn’t satisfied.
Fair enough – neither am I, and I’ve had decades longer to make peace with it.
Once you start looking, English turns out to be less a language and more a very long-running bit.
“Queue” is just the letter Q standing around with four silent friends who showed up and never left.
“Wednesday” is hiding a whole “d” it refuses to pronounce, like a guest who RSVP’d yes and then didn’t come.
“Colonel” is pronounced “kernel” because a French military title got run through Italian spelling and English mouths, and everyone agreed to just go with it.
There’s an old party trick where you can spell “fish” as “ghoti” – gh as in “enough,” o as in “women”, ti as in “nation” – and nobody can prove you wrong.
This isn’t a system with the occasional bug.
It’s a five hundred-year improv show that forgot it was supposed to end.
Try “comb,” “tomb” and “bomb”, spelled like triplets and behaving like strangers who’ve never met.
Or “read” and “read”, identical on the page and doing completely different jobs depending on what year you mean, like an actor playing two characters and never bothering to change costume.
“Poem” refuses to rhyme with “home”, even though “home” and “foam” get along just fine – as if one word simply decided, on principle, to be difficult.
“Nome”, the city in Alaska, is pronounced like “gnome”, which means English managed to make an American place name sound like a garden ornament purely by accident.
Honestly, the funniest part isn’t that English breaks its own rules.
It’s that it still has the nerve to charge admission for spelling bees – an entire televised competition built around a language that can’t consistently spell its own vocabulary, cheering on ten-year-olds for memorising the exceptions to rules the language itself never bothered to follow.
The comedy behind the chaos
Alright – deep breath, one moment of seriousness before the jokes resume.
Here’s the part that turns the joke into something almost affectionate.
English is what happens when Old English gets invaded by Old Norse, colonised by Norman French, dressed up in imported Latin for anything official, and then borrows Greek whenever it wants to sound clever at a dinner party.
Each wave brought its own spelling habits and never fully negotiated with the ones already there – like a longhouse renovated by three generations who each had their own idea of where the doorway should go, and nobody tore down the old one.
Then, right as pronunciation was mid-shift – the Great Vowel Shift, several centuries of vowels quietly rearranging themselves – the printing press showed up and froze the spelling exactly where it stood.
Pronunciation kept walking. Spelling stayed put, waving from the driveway.
We’ve been living with that gap ever since, dressed up as “proper English”.
There’s something almost Daoist in that, actually – the language moving like water, taking whatever shape the terrain forces on it, indifferent to whether the shape makes sense to the people downstream.
English was never trying to be logical.
It was trying to survive, the way water doesn’t argue with the riverbed, it just goes around it, and two hundred years later nobody remembers there was ever a straight line to begin with.
Once you see the language that way, the contradictions stop being embarrassing and start being kind of funny – the accumulated evidence of a thousand years of a language just winging it, badly, in front of an audience that eventually forgot it was allowed to laugh.
Borneopedia’s Straight Man
I think about this differently now because of Borneopedia – the work of documenting Iban and other Bornean languages before they thin out further.
Next to English’s slapstick, Iban is the straight man of the double act: what you write is what you say, no silent letters lurking around for nostalgia’s sake, no cosmetic “s” bolted on to look impressive, no fossil consonant kept purely for the memories.
It’s disciplined in a way English gave up being centuries ago, and there’s something quietly admirable about a language that never felt the need to perform.
But even the straight man needs the fool to make the joke land – a perfectly logical language is admirable, but it’s the chaotic one that gives you something to laugh about at the dinner table, and something worth teasing your kids with when they ask why grown-ups still can’t agree on how to spell things.
And that, maybe, is the real iqra worth practising here – not just reading the words but reading the joke underneath them.
The ‘Gasak Ajak’ spirit
Next time the urge hits to correct someone’s “it’s”, or their singular “they”, try laughing before you correct.
Ask where the word came from instead – what invasion, what printer’s deadline, what 16th century show-off left it looking the way it does.
You’ll usually find the “error” has a better story than the rule you were about to enforce, and a better story is always worth more than being right.
There’s a kind of phronesis in that – the practical wisdom of knowing when precision serves understanding and when it’s just theatre – that is the ‘Gasak Ajak’ mastery.
Cheers to Mr Rajah for that! Put the red pen down and let the language be what it actually is: not an exam you’re grading, but five centuries of an excellent, ongoing joke that everyone agreed to keep telling.
Eventually, you’ll arrive at a point where you have a radical collection of ‘Books of Memories’ that is ‘Straight From the Heart’.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
