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 God help me not to resemble this post. But today we tune into Merriam-Webster’s “19 words for the cranky and disagreeable,”part of the words at play column on its website. We will not get to all 19, but here are some of the more helpful terms as you seek to …
by Kevin Burton I’m sitting in the dark, on the couch my mom gave us. I hear the sound of a train in the distance. There is romance, poetry in the sound. I’m in the Man Cave and it couldn’t be mancavier. Two smallish beacons of light accompany the night without interrupting …
by Kevin Burton One adjective I have a hard time using properly is “stubborn.” I say it’s not a useful word. It’s easier when I’m not talking about people, a stubborn stain I can’t get out of my jeans for example, or a stubborn headache I can’t get rid of. In that sense, …
by Kevin Burton When my parents issued me flash cards before kindergarten, I wondered why the work “knife” had a K in it when it didn’t do anything. All these years later I hear from Merriam-Webster that not just e’s and k’s but all the letters of the English alphabet are silent at …
by Kevin Burton Silent E is so famous it has a song, we all know about that one. We know how the letter e at the end of man, changes the word to mane, for example. The silent e turns the a from short to long. But did you know all the …
by Kevin Burton Good day you awesome readers! Are you sick yet of the word “awesome”? The term’s overuse is sparking some awesome outrage among speakers of English. Some generational friction emerges when you look into who is cool with “awesome” and who is not. “Awesome” started with the California surfer crowd …
by Kevin Burton So I had this great idea for a series, my ABCs. Take the words that letters stand for in kindergarten, A for apple, B for ball, etc., and trade them in for the words that seem more appropriate after years and years of experience in life. I started this …
by Kevin Burton You hear the word “hoops” what comes to mind? Are you thinking earrings? Are you thinking bureaucracy, extra obstacles you have to jump through? Or are you thinking basketball? No right answer to this, we try to appeal to all types of readers here. But for me, it’s basketball. …
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