English is three languages wearing a trench coat

👋 Welcome back to the Medium Newsletter
Issue #156: a very weird engineering interview, a dispatch from the Eras tour, and good distraction
By Harris Sockel

English is a very strange language. I’m grateful to be a native speaker because the nuances of our bizarre idioms (“freezer burn”? “cold turkey”?) feel almost designed to confuse outsiders. Early in my career, I taught English as a second language and remember how stumped everyone was by the way “bomb,” “tomb,” and “comb” are spelled almost the same but pronounced completely differently.

See, English is actually three languages standing on each other’s shoulders and wearing a trench coat. (Mostly German, Latin, and Greek.) “Comb” is Germanic whereas “bomb” and “tomb” are Latinate, though their pronunciations diverged during the Middle Ages and people still aren’t totally sure why.

It’s even more complex than that, though, because (as we shared in issue #152) modern U.S. English also incorporates African, Arabic, and Japanese-derived words like karaoke (meaning “empty orchestra” in Japanese) or zombie (meaning “ghost” in Kikongo).

Recently on Medium, Robin Wilding explored just how weird English can get:

Foul fowls of goose become geese
and yet moose are never meese
multiple mouse are mice
but house are never hice

It’s a funny poem because it lists all the absurd rules we just, sort of, live with — often without knowing why they exist in the first place! English is sort of like a very old codebase. It’s the residue of millions of decisions made by overlapping groups of people over time… it’s optimized for flexibility and expansiveness, not ease of use.

Lastly, if you’re wondering about moose vs. goose: moose entered English pretty recently from Algonquin (the indigenous language of what is now Eastern Canada), whereas goose is a much older English word, because geese actually exist in England.

⚡ Lightning round: great, recent Medium stories in one sentence or less

• I was floored by this strange tale of an engineering interview gone wrong (the punchline comes about halfway through… wait for it), which includes a useful lesson: If you’re giving a candidate an assignment, pay them a fair hourly rate and make the task as close as possible to what they’d do on the job.
• One tip for spending less than the 37 minutes most Americans do on meal prep daily: always cut more vegetables than you need and store them for next time so you’ll never have to start from scratch, as Kaki Okumura explains.
• Every Eras tour concert contains Easter eggs, like when Taylor points the mic at backup dancer Kam who replaces a lyric with a word in the host country’s language — just one example of Swift’s obsession with building community amongst her fans, as Dana DuBois (who flew to Munich to see Swift last month) writes.

Your daily dose of practical wisdom: on good distractions

Distraction isn’t always bad! If you keep getting distracted by the same idea or pursuit, it might be a sign of interest — your subconscious trying to tell you what you should be doing more of.

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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com