English has always been a language with its shoelaces untied. Every time someone tries to tighten it — to make it behave, to make it stand upright and sensible — it finds a new way to fall over. The old schoolroom commandments still circulate, solemn and self‑important, even though half of them collapse under the weight of their own wording.
Consider the famous list of writing “rules” that break themselves as they go:
- “Avoid clichés like the plague.”
- “Use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit it when its not needed.”
- “Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary.”
Each one is a tiny act of self‑betrayal. A warning that demonstrates the very thing it warns against. A sermon delivered by someone standing in the wrong pulpit.
Once you start noticing these little collapses, you see them everywhere. In the paradoxes people toss out casually:
There’s no point in being pessimistic. It wouldn’t work anyway.
A Möbius strip of mood: pessimism predicting its own failure, optimism disguised as despair.
Why is there only one monopolies commission.
A body designed to prevent monopolies, named as if it were one.
Where does your lap go when you stand up.
It doesn’t go anywhere; it ceases to exist. A noun for a temporary landscape.
When an occasional table isn’t a table, what is it.
A table only in the subjunctive: a piece of furniture waiting for its moment.
What were the names of those two Chinese pandas?
I don’t know, but the Chinese called them Chichi and Anan.
A question that answers itself while pretending not to.
Was his name Winston Spencer Churchill?
Was whose name Winston Spencer Churchill.
A pronoun with its anchor kicked away; the sentence folds in on itself.
These are not jokes. They’re demonstrations. They show how meaning is always slightly unstable, always leaning, always ready to slip sideways if you nudge it. English is a language built on implied referents, assumed contexts, and shared illusions — and every so often, the illusion flickers.
And nowhere does it flicker more beautifully than in the compressed, breathless grammar of wartime headlines. The urgency trims away the scaffolding, and what remains is often unintentionally surreal.
Eighth Army Push bottles up Germans
A single misplaced noun, and the entire war becomes slapstick.
Earl Haig flies back to front
A man returning to the front line, or a man flying backwards through the air. English refuses to decide.
Language is full of loopholes. Most of the time we step over them without noticing. But every now and then, the floorboard lifts, and we glimpse the machinery underneath — the strange, provisional nature of meaning, the way a sentence can betray itself with perfect sincerity.
As a Systems Developer — and someone who taught Michael Jackson's lectures on methods — I eventually found myself wondering how specifications written in English, or any natural language, were ever expected to be unambiguous.
Most decisions aren’t really decisions. They’re the slow accumulation of small tilts — a preference here, a hesitation there — until the path ahead feels inevitable. The drama arrives later, when we pretend it was all a single moment of clarity. But the truth is quieter: life is mostly made of the choices we didn’t realise we were making.