A couple of weeks ago, on the Tantamount Words blog, I wrote about the USA Spelling Bee and commented about how a knowledge of the etymology of a word can help with spelling, particularly in a language like English where many different languages have contributed to the vocabulary.
Often, knowing how a word is pronounced is little help when it comes to writing it, but I personally don’t favour spelling reform as the written form can give us all sorts of clues about word families and relationships. Continue reading “Sound reasoning”
'Wordle' word cloud of last five blog posts
There was an interesting article on the BBC yesterday, about “information visualisation”, written by Davd McCandless, the guy behind the Information is Beautiful website.
The article discusses how information can often be shown more easily by pictures than by text, and includes a number of different types of graphic to demonstrate the point. Continue reading “picture a fact”
It’s been a while since I mentioned poets and narrators on the blog, but Google has prompted me to return to this hobby horse of mine as it seems that the ad selector is just as likely as the novice reader to confuse the writer with the narrator of a poem.
I’ve been looking through some old emails and found one a friend sent me a while back with a poem in it for me to comment on. The poem contained the phrase “slipped disc”. Continue reading “back to the narrator”
Last week I received a writers’ newsletter with yet another warning of a new phishing scam. This scam asks for your bank details so tax owed to you can be paid in directly. One of the recipients responded saying that she didn’t see how people could still be fooled; hadn’t we had enough warnings?
Of course people will continue to be fooled by such things because they want to believe that they are going to get a windfall.
But why people fall for a story like this one about swine ‘flu and zombism, is a bit more complex. It’s a brilliantly done hoax, but there are any number of clues that let a careful reader identify it as just that: a hoax. Continue reading “panics and pandemics”
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!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. Continue reading “is anybody listening?”
don't confuse the narrator 