Learning rope

The Language Matters team appreciates feedback and questions from readers. Sir Bob Jones wrote concerning an expression he heard from a Laotian family member. This person, who I assume was a learner of English, reported to Sir Bob a conversation she had with one of his then teenage sons.

She said his son wanted to ‘‘join company and learn rope’’. Sir Bob’s question was why friends and colleagues to whom he reported this conversation found the idea of ‘‘learning rope’’ so funny. As he commented, these acquaintances might not have found ‘‘sheeps’’ amusing in the same way.

A major difference between ‘‘learning rope’’ and ‘‘sheeps’’ is that the latter involves applying the general rule ‘‘add -s to make plural’’ to what looks like a singular ‘‘sheep’’. We might readily accept this overgeneralisation of a rule, because it seems to make sense.

When young children do this, it is actually evidence that they have internalised a rule of grammar, just as when they say ‘‘runned’’ for ‘‘ran’’ or ‘‘goed’’ for ‘‘went’’. No-one has told them such rules, which they have cleverly worked out for themselves. They then have to sort out when not to apply ‘‘add -s for plural’’ or ‘‘add -ed for past tense’’; that is, they have to learn the irregular exceptions to the regular pattern.

On the other hand, idiomatic expressions such as ‘‘learning the ropes’’ tend to be fixed, in the sense that changes to their basic grammatical structure seem generally unacceptable. Deviations from the usual form of idioms therefore appear quite odd and can even be amusing.

So even a passive form such as ‘‘the ropes were learned by him’’ would seem unusual, even though making a passive sentence is a very productive sentence construction process in English. ‘‘The vocabulary list was learned by the student’’ as a passive version of ‘‘the student learned the vocabulary list’’ is not odd in the same way.

In the Bob Jones example, ‘‘learn rope’’ does not have the big sentence structure changes that a passive version would have. The article ‘‘the’’ is missing and the noun ‘‘rope’’ should be plural. These might be characteristic errors from learners of English whose first language might not use articles or plural endings, as with Lao.

The speaker may also be extending a pattern she detected in other expressions using the verb ‘‘learn’’, such as ‘‘learn English’’ or ‘‘learn programming’’. Another fact that might also be relevant to the ‘‘learning rope’’ example is an oftenreported misinterpretation of ‘‘rote learning’’ as ‘‘rope learning’’.

Idioms are also fixed in the sense that they cannot be interpreted as a simple combination of the meanings of the component parts, even though their origins may have come from a more literal meaning. So ‘‘to learn the ropes’’ means to learn how a particular job is done, such as through an apprenticeship, and generally involves no ropes at all.

The expression originates in the nautical world, from pre-steam days when an apprentice sailor had to learn how to manage the ropes used to position the sails to catch the wind. Citations in the Oxford English Dictionary suggest that its extension to mean learning how to do other tasks became more common in the mid-19th century.

When language learners, regardless of whether they are learning their first or a subsequent language, do not quite get the form of an idiom right and say someone is going to ‘‘learn rope’’, it can seem quaint or amusing, but it is just as explicable as when they say they have ‘‘runned’’ after the ‘‘sheeps’’.