Intensive Porpoises and Other Reasons that English is a Weird Language

As an English major, I spend a lot of time thinking about words - nerdy, I know. But after nearly two decades of listening to speech patterns, I have come to the conclusion that English a really, really, reallllly weird language.

Maybe it's just that I'm American or Pennsylvanian or whatever, but English speakers, as a rule, have a propensity for not pronouncing vowels, ts at the ends of words, hs at the start of words, and letters between the first and last syllable. I mean, are we French? Do we just stick random qs and zs into into words for decoration? I've been taking Spanish classes for the past four years and one thing I've observed is that, in Spanish, you actually pronounce all the letters in the word (except for hs, but we won't get into that).

And I think it is for this reason that people go around referring to themselves as human "beans"; I don't know about you guys, but I'm pretty sure that I'm a human being. I'm not judging or anything, I just feel for the kid in my 10th grade history class who said that Hitler used the Jews as an "escape goat". I think he meant scapegoat (but it was 10th grade, so I'm not making any promises). It's like that episode of Fairly Odd Parents where the dad had bear claws and he was like "I'm going to beat up Mr. Crocker with my bear hands!" - but legitimately guys, it's bare hands (unless you're a mutant, in which case I think you have bigger problems to deal with).

And the intensive porpoises. Oh, the intensive porpoises. I love it when someone's trying to sound all smart and what not and they're all like "for all intensive porpoises, our country has been at war for the past 70 years" and I'm all like "dude, did you mean for all intents and purposes, because most dolphins are pacifists" and they're all like "oh...".

Just kidding, no one knows that dolphins are porpoises.

Just sayin'