As the great philosopher David Burge once intoned, “Yes, English can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought, though.”

Or, to quote the title of a volume by Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel, “The Tough Coughs As He Ploughs the Dough.”

The rules of our native tongue are simple — every hold is legal and falls count anywhere.

It’s bizarre. Or was the word bazaar? No, no, it’s bizarre, the one meaning strange. The other one — same word, different spelling — denotes a marketplace full of little shops.

The peculiarities of the language are why you can return from the zoo and tell your friends, “I knew the gnu was new.”

I believe the English language ran out of words a century or two ago, so we’ve been recycling old ones. We just change the spelling, slap a new meaning onto it, and away we go.

The problem is Americans are notoriously poor (not “pore” or “pour”) spellers. That’s why when you post a cute photo of your kid on social media, there’s always that aunt who responds with, “Awe.”

I presume she means to coo, “Aww,” but instead she uses the spelling that means, “an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration or fear.”

Then again, maybe your baby’s really ugly, and she meant overwhelming fear. If she’s an English teacher, you know she slung her insult in disguise.

I first bumped into those rascals of the English language in elementary school. Our teacher called them homophones, which sent us into giggly fits.

“No, no, no,” he yelled. “HomoPHONES. That means words that sound the same but have different meanings.”

Homophones are not to be confused with heteronyms.

“What are they teaching you at that school? They need to stick to grammar.”

“It is grammar, Dad. Homophones and heteronyms are participles of speechifying. I think that’s what the teacher said.”

Heteronyms are words spelled the same but pronounced differently based on what they mean. For example, you should never desert your friend in the desert. (Unless a good dessert is involved.) Or the dove dove through the air to snatch my french fries.

(No, wait, it’s seagulls, see, that dive to divvy up your fries with you.)

Homonyms (which sounds like a food made from dried maize kernels) have the same spelling and the same pronunciation, but a different meaning, such as the lumberjack saw the saw, but picked up his pick to bat at the bat swooping around his head. (Or maybe the bat dove with the dove to steal the steel saw, I mean, french fries that the sea gull saw. Yipes, my tang got tongueled on that one.)

Homographs (not the same thing as what we used to play vinyl records) have the same spelling and possibly the same pronunciation, but possibly not, but with a different meaning. The archer took a bow with this bow. A minute is a minute measure compared to the centuries of time (but not thyme — that’s a little spicier than time).

Got that? Good. Now explain it to me. Because a homonym can also be a homograph or a homophone.

So why do we have homographs and homophones when a good, ol’ homonym will do? Well, beat me with a beet. It’s English in all its contrary finest.

Which brings us to contronyms, which are the same word with opposite meanings depending on how you mean it, if you know what I mean.

One can run fast or stand fast — you’re either moving or can’t be moved. If you dust something, you may have sprinkled fine particles onto something, or wiped them off.

Where am I going with all this? Quite frankly, I’ve forgotten.

This is why there are so few jobs for English majors. Your head is crammed full of idioms and participles of language. They dangle from the creases and crevices of your cranium, but nobody understands a thing you say.

English majors turn into pesky annoyances like ants and mosquitos because they’re always wandering about diagramming sentences and yipping at normal people about ending sentences with prepositions, or the differences between a homonym, hominy, homograph and phonograph.

English is a grate pane. I mean, great pain.

Confuse Burt in any language at burton.w.cole@gmail.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.