r/ENGLISH

At a recent meeting a coworker spoke out and said "there will be a volunteer service rally next weekend where people can come to learn what types of service they can volunteer for. If you can't be there for that, there is a meeting this evening involving preparing for the volunteer service rally. If you're ironic, you could volunteer this evening to help prepare for the volunteer rally."

I I don't believe it's ironic but I can't nail down the term that would be applicable for a person to volunteer to organize a volunteer rally for people to learn where they can volunteer.

Is it irony or is it something else?

When a sentence in a reading makes no sense or you have no idea what the contents are, what do you usually do to better understand it?

What tools do you use and what do you type? Pasting on google is little help and its annoying having to switch tabs everytime.

What do you do when the problem is how the sentence is built, not one unknown word?

Also how often does this happen to you in a normal week of reading because it happens to me a good amount.

This is something we say so often but thinking about past tense of "used", as in employing something, and then adding "to", and it not meaning anything about use but just a past tense of "doing" I guess. It just seems very odd

Edit: Update 3 hours later: Very odd that there is 22 comments of very helpful and insightful comments that answered this for me, that themselves have plenty of upvotes, yet this post has been downvoted to 0. Very confused where that is coming from considering the positively and help everyone offered. Thank you to all that commented, you explained well and helped me understand

So basically, English is my first language and probably the only language that i can speak fluently. My mother tongue is something called Manglish (Malaysian English). Because family moved to US due to my dad's work, i just realised how different my English sounds like to people who speak actual 'proper' English. (luckily, i didn't get bullied for my weird accent lol).

Honestly, Manglish is not merely an accent. We, as malaysians, speak English in a completely different way which em sounds completely normal to me but frankly weird to Americans or Brits. For example, we tend to skip helping verbs (verbs that indicate the tense of a sentence like 'will'). We always say 'we go lunch later' instead of 'we are going to have lunch later'.

Can anyone from US or UK share how weird you find Manglish is. Or any Malaysians here can share your thoughts on your mother tongue.