queue
Most “Q” words are weird to start with, then just adding a bunch of silent vowels at the end doesn’t make it any less so.
pulchritudinous
such an ugly word, yet it means “beautiful”
Gerrymandering sounds like some sort of magic class.
It’s from a political cartoon depicting a corrupt districting plan as a salamander.
I always thought it sounded like Jerry Seinfeld between takes/shoots just hanging around the set. Not doing anything. Just ignoring everything around him. He’s just gerrymandering around the studio.
Be, is, are, was, am, were, being, been… are all the same word.
“To be” averbs, at least in romance languages usually have a bunch of different forms. “To have” usually too but English is a bit of an exception there.
“be” is an irregular verb in all languages, so it’s not unique to English. Bonus fun fact: Russian doesn’t have the verb “to be”.
Yes, and I feel like it’s even more irregular in Russian than just not existing. It’s not used in present tense as a copula, so in most cases where you would expect it in English. However it absolutely exists – быть – and is used like normal verbs in both past and future tense.
For example: «я здесь» – “I am here” (same word order, but this sentence has no verb), but «я был здесь» – “I was here”
And in the cases where it is used in present tense, there is a single conjugation regardless of subject: есть (in contrast to all other verbs, I assume at least, which all have distinct conjugations for 1/2/3rd person singular/plural).
A simple example for this would probably be sentences with “there is”, affirming the existence of something, as in “there is a bathroom” – «ванная есть». Contrived example for sure but I can’t think of something better right now.
Was going to reply that, it’s not that Russian doesn’t have it, it just gets omitted in the most common form.
But also one interesting thing is that from the examples you gave I can know your gender, because the verb to be is gendered in the past in Russian, which is very unique, I don’t know of any other language where verbs are gendered.
I suppose technically it’s Latin, but I’ve always been fascinated with “syzygy”.
