1. ‘Prison’ and ‘jail’ are the same thing, but a prisoner and a jailer are opposites! A prisoner is the one being locked up, while a jailer is the one who guards the prisoners to make sure they don’t escape.
   
2. Horror, horrible, horrifying and horrific all mean something very bad or scary. Terror, terrible and terrifying mean the same thing, but terrific is used to describe something great! Originally, terrific also meant something scary, but the meaning has changed over time. If you read something written hundreds of years ago, you might hear about ‘a terrific dragon’ or something similar. The author meant the dragon was scary and terrible, but we read it as being fun and cool!
   
3. English has a word for ‘the act of throwing someone out of a window’ (defenestration), but not for ‘the day after tomorrow’ or ‘the day before yesterday.’
   
4. If you look at the word parts, ‘awful’ and ‘awesome’ both originally meant ‘something that creates a feeling of awe,’ but these days, awful means something bad and awesome means something good!
   
5. If you hear someone saying ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ instead of ‘you’, it sounds very old-fashioned and formal to us. However, in Medieval times hundreds of years ago, people used ‘you’ as the more formal and distant way of addressing someone, and ‘thou’ was used for close friends and family. That means, if you could travel through time to the Middle Ages, and you met someone important, saying ‘I am honoured to meet thee’ could actually be quite insulting!
   
6. Sometimes words that are spelled the same are pronounced quite differently to each other. One of the best examples of this is the words ‘rough,’ ‘dough,’ ‘cough,’ and ‘through.’ Oh, and also ‘hiccough’! (That’s pronounced ‘hiccup,’ weirdly.) And on the other side of things, sometimes words that look completely different actually sound the same. ‘Pony’ and ‘bologna’ rhyme! Tear and tier are pronounced the same but tear and tear are different. It truly is ridiculous.
   
7. English uses something called the Oxford Comma, which is when you put a comma before the word ‘and’. It’s not always necessary, but sometimes it makes sentences clearer. For example, you could say “I met Tom Cruise, a construction worker and a circus clown,” but that makes it sound like Tom Cruise IS the worker and the clown. In this case it’d be better to use the Oxford Comma, ‘I met Tom Cruise, a construction worker, and a circus clown,’ to make it clear that these are three different people you’re talking about.
   
8. If something is ‘the bomb,’ it’s good. If it ‘bombed,’ it was bad. If it ‘works like a bomb,’ it’s good. If it’s ’a bomb,’ it could be either good or bad, depending on where you live. Don’t worry, I’m confused too!
   
9. Americans and British people use the word ‘quite’ in a different way. In America, it’s generally used to mean ‘very,’ but in England it means ‘just a bit.’ So if two people call something ‘quite good,’ the American is saying he liked it and the Brit is saying he didn’t!
   
10. If you thought contractions such as ‘can’t’ were bad, wait until you hear about triple contractions! These are most common used in areas such as the southern USA. How about ‘y’all’d’ve’? Can you guess what it means? ‘You all would have.’ And ‘I’dn’t’ve?’ ‘I would not have’!

Sometimes you just have to laugh at the ridiculousness that come from English being, as some people say, four languages in a trench coat pretending to be one language!