Words in the English language often have silent letters for no good reason. I think the extra letters should be donated to other languages that don’t have enough. The Hawaiian language comes to mind. I wasn’t paying close attention when I visited Hawaii, but I think the native language only has three or four consonants. But that’s okay because there isn’t much to talk about over there. Here’s just a sample of things you never need to say in Hawaii.
1. Hand me the snow shovel.
2. I wish we had some good scenery.
3. Look out for that snake!
4. Which direction is the beach?
5. Nice shoes.
But if we have no choice but to keep all of those silent letters, let’s extend the concept to entire words. It would be handy to have silent words inserted in all of my sentences. That way I could secretly be honest while outwardly being polite.
Me: That’s an attractive baby you have there (Silent: assuming it’s supposed to be a proboscis monkey).
I’d also like to proclaim here and now that all future sentences I utter are appended with “but of course there are obvious exceptions.”
This is important because about half of my time spent interacting with people involves me staring dully at them while they point out the obvious exception to whatever I’ve just said.
Example:
Me: “Nice weather.”
Other Person: “Not everywhere on earth. Plus, the day is young. It could still get cloudy later.”