Nowadays, English is the most commonly used language in the world. According to Ethnologue’s 2022 data, there are 373 million native speakers and slightly more than a billion people who use English as a foreign language. (If you’re curious, when it comes to native and non-native speakers combined, it’s followed by Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, and Spanish respectively.)
English is considered the lingua franca that connects people from all over the world. It’s the main language in business, and plays an important role in tourism and many other industries. It is also an essential part of the internet world, as nearly 60% of online content is presented in English.
English might be the most used language globally, but that doesn’t mean it’s equally easy to learn for everybody. When discussing the hoops learners have to jump through, Dr. Dorisa Costello told Bored Panda: “One difficulty with English is that because it is a mixture of various language groups, and has incorporated cognates from other languages, it is not phonetic. So, for a language learner, pronunciation will be difficult.
“I think our grammatical rules are pretty straightforward, though there are always exceptions to the rules, but actually speaking and knowing how to pronounce words has to be learned through usage. How do you know how to pronounce 'cough,' 'bough,' and 'though'? They are all different, but they look the same. You only know by hearing them pronounced and then memorizing that pronunciation.”
I remember having to cram idioms back in school myself, or trying my best to carve all the verb forms into my brain. And still, even after years of studying, an accidental your instead of you’re slips out every once in a while.
The Oxford International Education Group pointed out that mixing these two homophones is one of the most common mistakes when it comes to English grammar. They fall into the same category of headaches together with the usage of modifiers, apostrophes, and other specifics of this colorful language.
But whether you’re a native or not, making mistakes is inevitable. It was the poet Alexander Pope who said “to err is human” in the early 18th century, and it’s still as accurate now, if not even more so.
Nowadays, our language has been warped by the influence of technology and social media. Their rapid development constantly brings new words into our vocabulary. For example, the commonly used selfie, troll, and unfriend all came from the online world.
Moreover, there’s an ever-growing list of acronyms on the internet as well. (Which, in my honest opinion, is getting difficult to keep up with.) In this fast-paced world, they allow us to save a couple seconds when writing, which we often spend scrolling online anyways, LOL.
In addition to the good old laughing out loud, you can often encounter such acronyms as TL;DR (too long; didn’t read), SMH (shaking my head), or G2G (got to go), just to name a few.
But the internet can be a double-edged sword. The same way it encourages us to use slang or forget all about grammar rules, it allows people to get better acquainted with the language and learn it faster. A 2014 survey revealed that 93% of people agree that the internet is useful for learning English.
It also comes in handy when you have no idea what a certain phrase means. A quick online search can help figure out why it’s called a catalytic converter (related to catalyst) rather than a Catholic converter or why taken aback might make more sense than taking a bath when it comes to someone’s indescribable beauty.
Such colorful expressions can benefit English users in multiple ways. “Idiomatic expressions act as a kind of shorthand, where you express a larger idea very compactly,” Dr. Costello pointed out. “While this also leads to using cliches, which I think limit language, they do express ideas more quickly, so they are useful that way.
“Also, because they usually are connected to a particular cultural context, a language learner gets a glimpse into a language's culture, which I think is important to truly mastering a language,” she added.
Britannica covered the etymology of some popular phrases in English in one of their articles. It revealed that saying to turn a blind eye could be traced back to a man using his blind eye for looking through a telescope, while the popular expression of feeling under the weather arguably relates to sailors hiding under the bow of the ship to hide from bad weather conditions when feeling ill.
Some more examples, such as letting one’s hair down or giving a cold shoulder were explained by Grammarly. If taken quite literally, these expressions might throw someone off guard. (Especially if it’s a foreign language they’re trying to wrap their head around.)
“Many of our idiomatic expressions have particular cultural context, which may be old or outdated, but explains why the expression makes sense. For a language learner, without the context, these phrases may not make sense, or a speaker may not know when to use it properly,” the expert told Bored Panda.
Both of the aforementioned examples are based on habitual actions in the past, which were exactly what the idioms say. Letting their hair down was something aristocratic women would do when they came home and could finally relax; while a shoulder of mutton, pork, or beef chop was given to a guest signaling it’s time for them to leave.