Why does man form the root of both human and woman in English? In Polish, by contrast, the words for a man, a human, and a woman—mężczyzna, człowiek, and kobieta—are three entirely separate terms. What’s more, man in English denotes not only a male individual but also a person in general and even humanity itself, depending on context. It becomes specifically male only when marked by an article. Doesn’t that reinforce patriarchy?
More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com
From anacoluthon through zeugma,
Mr Honk savoured his grammatical incongruity
in the omnitude of the alphabet
as if linguistic phenomena were the draught that gave him life—
even if pronounced by a Doppler shift—
with an inclination to say ‘perhaps’ rather than ‘maybe’
and ‘indeed’ instead of a blunt ‘yes’,
which earned him the well-deserved title of snob—
a negligible price to pay for a stint in the temple of solitude—
the lost consort.
More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com
I like the name Paul. There is a strong but warm ring to it, and the way you shape your lips to say it, as if you were about to kiss, sends shivers down my spine. If I had a boyfriend, I’d love it if that was his name. On the other hand, I’ve never liked mine. Every time I say it, I feel like I have a large dumpling in my mouth, and I picture a klutz and a bit of a plodder. Oh well, one cannot have everything in life.
More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com
Being a native speaker is certainly very convenient, but it often makes you also blind to the idiosyncrasies of your language. After all, you absorb it with your mother’s milk (is that why they call it a mother tongue?), so you think nothing of it. To give an example, I never noticed that one of the constructs in my native Polish violated logic—well, even if it doesn’t inherently do so, a negative concord definitely does seem counterintuitive to formal logical systems—until I started learning English. But learning the latter is not without its own challenges, one of the biggest being articles—something completely alien to me, since they don’t exist in Polish. They simply make no sense to me. I could say, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’, but I don’t think that proverb is the most fitting here.
More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com
hidden pilcrow 