Native speakers make mistakes, too, and sometimes those mistakes are painfully obvious to learners of that language! Of course learners tend to know the grammar of the language better than natives, while natives tend to have the advantage in pronunciation. There are, however, times when the language itself seems to be doing its best to confuse everyone involved.
That’s where Which is English comes in. Players of this English game are presented with pairs of words or phrases and must choose the option that is most natural and correct. The challenges start out easy, but get harder as you go—even for native speakers typically get one of the fourteen challenges wrong. In this series, we’ll present some of the more challenging Which is English pairs and explain their answers!
Let’s start with the English expression ‘to get one’s just deserts’ meaning ‘to be punished or rewarded for earlier actions’. The ‘just’ here is connected with ‘justice’ (that’s the easy part), but what about ‘desert’? The meaning of the expression is ‘to get what you deserve’ and is often used to say that someone will eventually be punished for what they’ve done wrong. So perhaps the ‘desert’ is the prize for bad behavior? By now many of our native readers will be screaming that it’s not ‘desert’ but ‘dessert’ (note the ‘s’, it makes a big difference!)
just deserts vs. just desserts
The odd thing is that they are half-right. To understand why we have to take a detour on pronunciation: ‘Desert’ and ‘dessert’ both have a /z/ sound in the middle, but the hot sandy place has the stress at the beginning ‘DEsert’ while the sweet delicious thing has the stress at the end ‘deSSERT’ (a trick to remembering this is that ‘dessert’ comes at the end of the meal and you want a double size i.e. double ‘s’). The only problem is that in ‘just deserts’ the stress comes at the end! Hence many people think it’s “desserts”, perhaps imagining that a good person will get a nice dessert and a bad person will get some horrible disgusting thing like caramelized cockroaches.
In truth though, the ‘desert’ in ‘just deserts’ is neither sandy nor delicious, it’s a noun related to ‘deserve’ – seems obvious doesn’t it? All good? Well no, not quite, you might remember a certain rule about stress in noun and verb forms such as “to reBEL” vs. “a REBel”, “to proTEST” vs. “a PROtest” and of course “to deSERT” (to leave a group without permission) vs. “a DEsert”. So why not “to deSERVE” vs. “a DEsert”? The simplest answer seems to be that the noun and verb were both borrowed from French where they both have stress on the final syllable and have somehow remained that way through the centuries (other examples are ‘hoTEL’, ‘poLICE’ and of course ‘deSSERT’).
So we end up with an expression that is commonly used, but confusing to native and learner alike. Still, it’s given us a nice look at stress and pronunciation. If you’ve got your head around all this, I think a dessert is truly your just deserts right now!
Ready to put your new knowledge to the test? Play Which is English and let us know how you rank!
