English is a messed up language. Trust me, I’m a writer… This language baffles me almost every day.
With words like colonel and kernel, corpse and corp, even the word pronunciation itself, English is no piece of cake – even for people who have been speaking it their whole lives.
This poem, called “The Chaos”, is a tricky piece of language legerdemain. So tricky, in fact, that only 90% of english speakers can actually pronounce every word correctly. The poem was written by Gerard Nolst Trenite, a Dutch immigrant whoe studied the English language for years before penciling this problematic poem.
Many words in “The Chaos” are pronounced differently from how they are spelled. The syntax is strenuous – at best – and doesn’t tell much of a story. But if you can pronounce your way through this thorny prose then you know for sure, you are in the top ten percent of English speakers. Congratulations! On the other hand if there’s a few words that stump you, don’t feel bad – being in the top ten percent is pretentious. Besides, this is your chance to look those perplexing lyrics up in a dictionary and learn their phonetics! Because knowledge is power.
A Frenchman was quoted saying that six months of hard labor would be better than reading that poem twice. I think I might agree… See for yourself though.
