Old-school news, just in time
by Kevin Burton Here’s one subject that never came up when I was teaching English in Mexico – thank God! In English, when you see the vowel combination “ae” how do you pronounce it? This was brought to my attention on an otherwise glorious Saturday morning by our friends at the Merriam-Webster …
Continue reading “Wobble Talk And Fighting Words In English”
by Kevin Burton Surely you’ve heard this old joke: What do you call a person who speaks three languages? Trilingual. What do you call a person who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call a person who speaks only one language? American. A wicked, sweeping generalization that. Not entirely fair. But …
by Kevin Burton Not smashing, not daft, something mid-table I’d say, to use a football analogy. I thought I was ready, so I had a go, with middling results. Every day Merriam-Webster sends me an e-mail to help me watch my language. A few weeks ago they announced “The Great British Vocabulary …
by Kevin Burton My career as an English as a Second Language teacher came to an abrupt early end one night under the streetlights outside a small taco shop in Puebla. To tell you how and why that happened, I first turn to BBC writer Nicole Chang, who recently wrote about what speaking …
by Kevin Burton Who’s hungry for some quibbles and bits?!… The cat litter my cats use is called Vibrant Life, which strikes me as funny. Vibrant Life sounds more like a megachurch. Vibrant Life a kind of paper litter, which at first did not strike me as funny. It’s more expensive than …
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