Oddities of English

What a quirky language we speak! This morning I did our weekly 'smalls' wash -- clothes that we consider too delicate to put in the industrial-strength washing machines in our basement laundry, used mid-week by our cleaning lady, Sue Ng for our sheets and towels. Among these 'smalls' was a colourful skirt that Wendy actually bought, as opposed to making it herself as she mostly does, or rather did until she fell ill; it cost all of $4.00 in a sidewalk sale. I asked her as I put it in our dinky little apartment-size washing machine, "Are these colours fast, or will they run?" She understood exactly what the question meant. I inserted an entry on"sanction" in the Dictionary of Public Health specifically to make another point about the English language, that this word can mean either of two diametrically opposite things, and the meaning becomes clear only from the context.(That was self-indulgence, pure and simple: the word has no particular relevance to public health). When I was learning to speak Italian many years ago, my teacher, who came from Torino (Turin) and loved his lovely language, drew our attention to an Italian phrase that has this quality. Unfortunately I've forgotten what the phrase was. Perhaps one of my readers can remind me. There are a few like this in French too, that crop up from time to time in the CBC Radio program, C'est la Vie. A young Japanese doctor, son of my host when I'd been a guest of the Japanese Public Health Association, found these peculiarities of English altogether too perplexing and just about switched off, thereby destroying his reason for coming to Canada and the USA in the first place. No doubt when we learn how to communicate with whales and dolphins, we will find oddities like these in their languages too.