Englishly?

4:48pm - 21 July 2007 - 386 views - No Comments
Posted in: Daily, Gibberish

English language puzzles me sometimes. I was searching for a weird *erhum* term in my dictionary. I didn’t find what I wanted, but it returned several suggestions instead. One of them was spiderly - simply meaning “relating to or resembling a member of the class Arachnida”. It was the word spider added with a simple suffix, and I went hey how can you simply add a suffix like that and say it’s a valid word?!

In disbelief, I went searching for similar terms – chickenly, duckly, fishly, birdly, fishly, centipedely, pigly, catly, tigerly, monkeyly……. you get my point.

None of them exists. So why is there such a word like spiderly? What makes spiders more distinguished than say… chicken?! If there’s any animal which should be given that kind of recognition, it should be chicken. I want to be able to say “hey this burger tastes chickenly.”

But why spiders???