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 Today is National Potato Chip Day, but I didn’t study for the quiz. My excuse, (there is always an excuse) Consumer Reports let me down. In the past the magazine has published consumer preference stories about chips of all kinds. But I found nothing on their website and by googling …
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 One of my frequent prayers is that God will “open the doors that need to be open and close the doors that need to be closed.” This is a necessary prayer because I can’t see around time corners to see the future and I’m not always so good at the …
by Kevin Burton I think I’ve found America kids! This after considerable searching. You’ll never guess where. Listen to this: “The Saginaw Valley Rail Trail is one of Saginaw County’s gems, stretching 11 miles from St. Charles to Saginaw. It incorporates a number of natural features including: seven bridges over various rivers …
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 …
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 It’s Saturday baby, the day we’ve all been waiting for! You know what that means. It’s date night! But what does date night mean anymore? Between Covid 19 safety measures and the new geezer bedtimes we’re learning to prefer, date night isn’t what it used to be. …
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