Night Thoughts

First, a funny commentary on our current election drama. I too would like not to come out until it's all over. Instead, I have sleepless nights. Last night, Bonnie Spur (my left hipbone spur) wasn’t behaving, so every few minutes after I’d turned onto my left side, she gave an irritable growl and woke me up. There I was, three o’clock, eyes shut but not sleeping. And what nugget did my mind come up with for my middle-of-the-night perusal? Often times, it’s song lyrics for songs I haven’t heard for years and years. Not this time, though, instead it was another linguistic anomaly that would drive crazy a student trying to learn English: the pronunciation of the “ng” in so many of our words. The Spanish language is almost entirely consistent in the pronunciation of their words, and for any exceptions they use diacritical marks to guide speakers, such as accents and tildes. But English doesn’t seem to follow any logical reason for our different pronunciations. I can hear Barbra Streisand, when she talked about herself as a singer, saying the word with a hard G, maybe a little Jewish flip at the end: “Sing-guh.” We have “finger” and “linger” that take the hard G, but then there’s “singer” and “swinger” that go soft. Look at “anger” and “hanger,” hard and soft with nearly the same spelling. And when we add an “e” after the “g,” it switches to the French sound in “gendarme” and “Gigi,” as in “hinge,” “singe,” “range,” “ginger,” and “challenge.” Look at “lung” and “lunge,” nearly the same spelling but entirely different pronunciations. It’s enough to drive anyone batty. Just imagine yourself lying awake in the dead of night, sifting through words to find examples of these crazy sounds in English. It’s enough to drive me crazy. My wife would certainly agree with that. Maybe tonight I can work on all the inconsistent “ough” sounds.