It’s time for spring cleaning! Posted by carol on Mar 31, 2020
Spring has come, readers! But along with it, the rise of one of the biggest pandemics in recent history, the coronavirus, a disease better known as CoVid-19. Drastic measures are being taken worldwide to curb its spread, one of the main and most effective ones being self-isolation, which means spending the majority of your time…
Cabin Fever Posted by Gary Locke on Mar 26, 2020
Do you have cabin fever yet? It’s an English language phrase of American origin, expressing a feeling of restless anxiety and boredom from being indoors for a prolonged period of time. It is also something that you may soon be experiencing. Literally billions of people all over the world are finding themselves in self-isolation, or…
English Words in the News: Coronavirus Edition Posted by Gary Locke on Mar 19, 2020
How’s your week going? The world, it seems, is having a singular experience. That is to say, we’ve never seen anything like this before. Before anyone argues that the so-called Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, or the events surrounding 9/11, were similar, let me stop you right there. The world is far more interconnected than…
English Songs to Sing While Washing Your Hands Posted by Gary Locke on Mar 12, 2020
Suddenly everybody is becoming very conscious of properly washing your hands. You’d think that, until very recently, handwashing was an afterthought. Did people think those signs in public washrooms that read, “Employees MUST wash hands before returning to work!” did not apply to the rest of us? Folks are also hoarding toilet paper like they’ve…
“The Chaos” of the English Tongue Posted by Gary Locke on Mar 5, 2020
If you’ve ever scratched your head at the bizarre pronunciation practices of English speakers, then this poem is for you! It’s called “The Chaos”, and was originally written by Dutch traveler, linguist, and teacher Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenité (also known by the pseudonym Charivarius), and published in a 1920 textbook Drop Your Foreign Accent: engelsche…
Expecting a baby in English Posted by carol on Feb 29, 2020
Good morning, dear readers! We all know how important and delicate it can be to express ourselves in a foreign language. Even simple, everyday things in our native language become more complex when we try to communicate them. And it so happens that a couple of my students over the past couple of months had…
The Many Ways of Anyway Posted by Gary Locke on Feb 27, 2020
As you probably know, Americans are very good at abusing the English language. We fall into habits of misapplying words when speaking and, if we do it often enough, the wrong word becomes part of common speech. This is called a colloquialism. The problem with some English colloquialisms, though, is that they can confuse anyone…