LANGUAGE IS AMAZING

How my 'slightly erratic' brain followed a few random dots… and somehow landed somewhere interesting

Ok so this post is nothing to do with belief coding, but you may get an insight in to how my mind words..

My brain does this thing a lot. Someone says something… a tiny detail catches my attention… and suddenly I’m off down a rabbit hole connecting dots that don’t seem connected at all.

Sometimes it’s useless. Sometimes it’s brilliant. And sometimes it’s just a reminder that language is amazing.

The moment that triggered it

I was on a webinar recently with a Spanish speaker. As they were speaking English, I noticed something interesting in the way certain letters were being pronounced. It’s something you hear quite often once you tune into it.

Things like:

• B and V sounding almost the same

• Y and LL sounding the same

• C sometimes sounding like TH

• Pronouncing letters that English speakers tend to swallow

And then I noticed something else.

They pronounced the word sign slightly more like “sig-n”.

And suddenly my brain did that thing.

Because if you pronounce the G, you suddenly notice something that English normally hides.

sign, signal, signature, design

They’re obviously connected. But because English drops the sound in sign, most of us never really think about it. The Spanish pronunciation accidentally reveals the family tree of the word.

That little moment set my brain off.

Down the rabbit hole

Because once you start noticing this stuff, you realise English is full of it. Words that look unrelated… but actually come from the same root. And even more interestingly, words that have slowly flipped their meaning completely over time.

Terrific once meant terrifying

Take the word terrific. Today it means something great. “That’s terrific.”

But originally it came from the Latin terrere, meaning to frighten. So terrific originally meant causing terror. A “terrific storm” once meant a frightening storm.

Somewhere along the way, the meaning drifted: terrifying → powerful → impressive → excellent

And now something terrifying has somehow become… brilliant.

Awful used to mean the opposite

Another favourite example is awful. Today if something is awful, it’s bad. But originally awful literally meant full of awe. Something majestic. Something overwhelming. Something powerful enough to inspire wonder. Mountains could be awful. Cathedrals could be awful. Then slowly the emotional weight shifted until awful ended up meaning… well… awful.

Meanwhile, awesome went the other way

Awesome started life meaning something that inspired awe. Huge mountains. Thunderstorms. Divine power. Now someone can say a sandwich is awesome. Language has clearly relaxed a little.

My brain loves these moments

What fascinates me is how these things reveal themselves. Not through studying linguistics. But through random observations.

A Spanish accent. A slightly different pronunciation. A letter that someone didn’t swallow like English normally does.

And suddenly you see the structure underneath the language. It’s like lifting a carpet and discovering the original floorboards.

English is beautifully messy

English is a strange beast. It’s a mix of:

• Germanic roots

• Latin influence

• French influence

• Norse influence

Which is why it’s full of silent letters, strange spellings, and words that don’t quite behave logically. But inside that chaos is history. Sometimes thousands of years of it. Hidden inside the words we use every day.

The joy of following random dots

One of the things I’ve learned to appreciate about my brain is that slightly erratic curiosity.

It jumps from one thing to another; A webinar. A pronunciation. A word. A pattern. A historical root. Suddenly what looked like unrelated dots start forming a picture. And every now and then you realise…

The dots weren’t random at all.

Which is why every now and then I’m reminded of something simple:

Language really is amazing… and the same goes for accents within the same language.

You can hear how a dialect slowly morphs as you move from one area to another. Then you realise that as people travelled, traded, and settled in new places, words and pronunciations travelled with them.

In certain places you can almost hear the cultural history in the accent itself — especially in port cities, where people from different nations mixed together for generations.

Take Scousers and Geordies as great examples. Sea-faring trade and migration had a huge influence on the local sound of the language. Accents become these incredible audible melting pots of history, movement, and culture.

Anyway… ramblings over.

Back to my webinar. 😉