Category: language & communication

occasional poetry

There are lots of comments around the web referring to Elizabeth Alexander’s poem composed for Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration.

This article, written by Jim Fisher before the ceremony, makes interesting reading, as it includes information about previous inaugural poems and US background that helps put things a little more in perspective.
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is anybody listening?

Way back, in my incarnation as an EFL teacher, we talked a lot about the four language skills – reading, writing, speaking and listening.

The skills were usually grouped in pairs. Either written versus oral (reading and writing versus speaking and listening) or active (speaking and writing) versus passive (reading and listening).

He that hath ears to hear, let him listen!
He that hath ears to hear, let him listen!
In fact, particularly when we’re talking about English, using the word “passive” to describe listening is inaccurate. English is a stress-timed language where the most important words – those that contain new or important information – are emphasised. The other words often disappear into a blur of unstressed sounds, including the schwa, which means the listener is presented with a kind of fill-in-the-blanks puzzle to deduce the speaker’s meaning.

This last week I’ve been busy with cvs – a translation for a client, assisting a friend with an on-line application, and general advice and encouragement for another friend who just got “let go” from his job. All of them need to include information about their language skills. And none of them mention one of the basics: there is no mention anywhere of listening.
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don’t make me raise my voice!

For years there have been jokes about whether computers are male or female. (There are many variations on the theme, this link shows just one.) But has anyone ever actually tested a computer’s response to the different kinds of violencia de género (gender violence) as the Spanish insist on calling domestic violence?

Yes, computers are delicate mechanisms, and, if you physically mistreat one, it will no doubt break down eventually. But what about verbal abuse?

At last we have a – partial – answer:

You have been warned: don’t shout at your computer (or at least, don’t shout at your disk drive).

Fortunately, I think it’s still all right to make snide remarks.

successes, exits and happenings

Although it’s only the 30th, people in the village are already beginning to round their conversations off with the phrase “feliz salida y entrada…”

the way out to success?
the way out to success?

It always seems such a mouthful to me, and I can never get the order right – subconsciously I think “happy exit and entrance” seems a bit cart-before-horsish, although in the context of the old year leaving before the new one comes in, it’s perfectly correct. Still, it twists my tongue every time, and today it’s set me thinking:
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books to look cool

According to a story on the BBC website, Don’t be 404, know the tech slang,  new words and expressions are entering the language, driven by modern technology such as Oyster cards, the internet, mobile phones and “textese”.

This probably won’t come as much of a surprise to many of us already happy to include abbreviations like b4, u, @ and wld in our msgs in an attempt to keep the costs down, even if we baulk at l8r and draw the line at ur, wat or y?.
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