A past edition of time magazine as seen above mentions the tool that has made a lot possible, this is the World Wide Web. As of today I will be offering you the chance to buy package lessons of 5, 10 or 30 (unlimited)  online English lessons. For any of you who don’t know how this works, it’s simple, a quick sign-up registration to www.myngle.com check out my profile here

Myngle is ….

….free for students and teachers to sign up and provides an online environment for live individual and group lessons for basically any language and level from any type of teacher. You can choose your own teacher or student depending on your specific needs, availability and price! If you are a student, you can try out a demo lesson with your selected teacher before you have to pay anything.

….whether you are a complete beginner or require advanced conversational practice, Myngle will have a solution for you. And you can take or give language lessons from the comfort of your home at the times when you desire. Whether one evening lesson one week and 3 morning lessons the following weeks, you decide! There will be no more need to find a native speaker near your home location and no more traveling time. No need for a physical classroom any more. Myngle also eliminates the need for face-to-face interaction between students and teachers.

Source www.myngle.com

etymology (n) an account of the origins and the developments in meaning of a word.
Concise Oxford Dictionary.

Once limited to blasphemy, ‘bad language’ has evolved over many thousands of years to represent both the lowest and the highest forms of human expression. Such words can cause the greatest offence if used casually and repeatedly, at an inappropriate time or place, or in the wrong company. Yet often, a well-timed swear-word can make people laugh. Among friends, almost any word might be considered acceptable, while even the mildest of curses might be distressing if heard coming from the mouth of a child. Even something as simple as the type of voice a person has can affect how the word is received. Should a British Royal swear it might be considered witty, while the exact same phrase coming from an East-end garage mechanic might be interpreted as crude and base. And words that might once have been commonplace are nowadays considered entirely unacceptable.

Two nations divided by a common language.
Oscar Wilde.

With swearing, context is everything. Words that are in common use in the UK are indecipherable to American ears, and vice versa. It takes more than just a simple ‘bloody’ (a corruption of ‘By your Lady’, a religious exclamation from the Middle Ages’) to swear like a Brit. Most British swear-words have a history longer than that of the United States itself, evolving out of even older European languages such as Norse, High German and Latin (hence British phrases like ‘a stream of Anglo-Saxon’ or, most commonly, ‘pardon my French’). For instance, the word ‘ass’ in American-English, meaning buttocks or anus, evolved from the British word ‘arse’. Before WW1, people in southern English would pronounce the word ‘ass’, meaning donkey, with a long ‘a’, making it indistinguishable from ‘arse’ in spoken English. Considered only moderately vulgar in the UK, it can be put to a number of different, often contradictory uses… The phrase ‘can’t be arsed’ signifies apathy or a lack of enthusiasm, yet to ‘get your arse in gear’ means to become organised or to ‘hurry up. ‘Arse over tit’/'tip’, ‘arse over apex’, ‘arse up’ or ‘arse about’ are all phrases which describe a spectacular prattfall or clumsy action. The word ‘prattfall’, incidentally, also means ‘arse over tit’; ‘pratt’ being an old word for ‘arse’ that has come to lose its meaning over the years. The word ‘pratt’ is still, however, used to this day to mean a fool. A ‘Smart arse’ (signifying someone who is too clever for their own good) can be used either affectionately or to cause offence, while ‘Silly arse’ merely means a fool. To ‘arse about’ can also mean to play the fool. A ’short-arse’, however, is someone with short legs.

A less-offensive term for ‘posterior’ in the UK is ‘bum’, which in America might referred to as ‘butt’. It made its first appearance in around the 14th Century, and was put to good use by Shakespeare: In Measure for Measure, Escalus asks Pompey what his second name is. ‘Bum, Sir’ replies Pompey. To which Escalus replies ‘Troth, and your bum is the greatest thing about you; so that in the beastliest sense you are Pompey the Great.’ (They don’t tell ‘em like that any more - thank goodness). However, in America the word as a noun has come to means tramp or hobo, while as a verb to mean ’scrounge’ or borrow’.

Just for fun, one of my classic favourites Two Ronnies Swear Box

Source www.bbc.co.uk

English grammar is a body of rules (grammar) specifying how phrases and sentences are constructed in the English language. Accounts of English grammar tend to fall into two groups: the descriptivist, which describes the grammatical system of English; and the prescriptivist, which does not describe English grammar but rather sets out a small list of social regulations that attempt to govern the linguistic behaviour of native speakers.  Prescriptive grammar concerns itself with several open disputes in English grammar, often representing changes in usage over time.

Punctuation is everything in written language other than the actual letters or numbers, including punctuation marks. Punctuation marks are symbols that correspond to neither phonemes (sounds) of a language nor to lexemes (words and phrases), but which serve to indicate the structure and organization of writing, as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading it aloud. In English, punctuation is vital to disambiguate the meaning of sentences. For example, “woman, without her man, is nothing,” and “woman: without her, man is nothing,” have greatly different meanings, as do “eats shoots and leaves” and “eats, shoots and leaves.”

The rules of punctuation vary with language, location, register and time, and are constantly evolving. Certain aspects of punctuation are stylistic and are thus the author’s (or editor’s) choice. Tachygraphic language forms, such as those used in online chat and text messages, may have wildly different rules.

Source www.loregate.com www.wikipedia.com

Not only was The Color Purple (Am English spelling) a great film to watch but also the phrase that Oprah Winfrey (who starred in the film) expressed as Barack Obama won the recent presidential elections in the US “The Color Purple has won.”

It also seems a very positive year for afro/american and anglo/african celebrities from Lewis Hamilton’s recent win of the World Gran Prix racing title to Halle Berry’s nomination of the sexiest woman of 2008. I am perhaps a long way down the line with my anglo/african roots but now we know and have known all along, it’s not about the colour of your skin but how good you are! I hope to follow in these peoples footsteps with my Teaching English to Adults, Aniya

In case you didn’t already know The United States of America has a new President

Barack Hussein Obama II (pronounced /bəˈrɑːk hʊˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician and the winner of the presidential election of November 4, 2008. He is currently the President-elect of the United States of America and is expected to take office as the forty-fourth President of the United States on January 20, 2009. He is also the incumbent junior United States Senator from Illinois.

Obama is the first African American to be elected President of the United States, and was also the first African American to be nominated for President by a major U.S. political party. A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, he became the first African American to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review. Obama worked as a community organizer and practiced as a civil rights attorney before serving three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. He taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he announced his campaign for the U.S. Senate in January 2003. After a primary victory in March 2004, Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He was elected to the Senate in November 2004 with 70 percent of the vote.

As a member of the Democratic minority in the 109th Congress, he helped create legislation to control conventional weapons and to promote greater public accountability in the use of federal funds. He also made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. During the 110th Congress, he helped create legislation regarding lobbying and electoral fraud, climate change, nuclear terrorism, and care for returned U.S. military personnel. Obama announced his presidential campaign in February 2007, and was formally nominated at the 2008 Democratic National Convention with Delaware senator Joe Biden as his running mate.

Source www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama

Take an Election Quiz www.pocanticohills.org

As of this week I will be offering 30 minute online lessons via www.myngle.com and further on in the month it’ll be possible to buy packages of 5 or 10 lessons (this will make lessons more convenient for those of you who have less time) plus the fact you will save on buying a bundle of lessons. For any Italian students who want to know how Myngle works please look here and for any ulterior information please don’t hesitate in contacting me here infotheenglishteacher@gmail.com Aniya

Source Myngle

The 2008 Language Show, the UK’s biggest event for language learners, language teachers, linguists and anyone with a passion for languages. This event offers language enthusiasts all the help, advice and resources needed to learn or teach languages under one roof.

Over 80 FREE seminars and 160 exhibitors cover every aspect of language teaching and learning…all this, in a fun and entertaining way.

Let your language adventure start here…

I would have been really interested to have been able to attend this show but only recently heard of it through Elisa at  www.myngle.com

Source www.thelanguageshow.co.uk

History

Halloween has its origins in the ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain (Irish pronunciation: [ˈsˠaunʲ]; from the Old Irish samain).The festival of Samhain is a celebration of the end of the harvest season in Gaelic culture, and is sometimes  regarded as the “Celtic New Year”. Traditionally, the festival was a time used by the ancient pagans to take stock of supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores. The ancient Gaels believed that on October 31, now known as Halloween, the boundary between the alive and the deceased dissolved, and the dead become dangerous for the living by causing problems such as sickness or damaged crops. The festivals would frequently involve bonfires, into which bones of slaughtered livestock were thrown. Costumes and masks were also worn at the festivals in an attempt to mimic the evil spirits or placate them.

History of name

The term Halloween is shortened from All Hallows’ Even (both “even” and “eve” are abbreviations of “evening”, but “Halloween” gets its “n” from “even”) as it is the eve of “All Hallows’ Day”,which is now also known as All Saints’ Day. It was a day of religious festivities in various northern European Pagan traditions, until Popes Gregory III and Gregory IV moved the old Christian feast of All Saints’ Day from May 13 (which had itself been the date of a pagan holiday, the Feast of the Lemures) to November 1. In the ninth century, the Church measured the day as starting at sunset, in accordance with the Florentine calendar. Although All Saints’ Day is now considered to occur one day after Halloween, the two holidays were, at that time, celebrated on the same day. Liturgically, the Church traditionally celebrated that day as the Vigil of All Saints, and, until 1970, a day of fasting as well. Like other vigils, it was celebrated on the previous day if it fell on a Sunday, although secular celebrations of the holiday remained on the 31st. The Vigil was suppressed in 1955, but was later restored in the post-Vatican II calendar.

Source www.en.wikipedia.org

I thought I’d give this a mention as I gave a lesson based on The Devil’s Dictionary this morning, and my students found it all so very interesting. So what is The Devil’s Dictionary? The Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce, is a satirical book published in 1911. It offers reinterpretations of terms in the English language.

Here are some

Examples

Abstainer

A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.

Arrest

Formally to detain one accused of unusualness.

Barometer

An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having.

Bore

A person who talks when you wish him to listen.

Cannon

An instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.

Cat

A soft indestructible automaton provided by Nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.

Christian

One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ insofar as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.

Congratulation

The civility of envy.

Corporation

An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

Cynic

A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic’s eyes to improve his vision.

Dictionary

A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.

Education

That which discloses to the wise, and disguises from the foolish, their lack of understanding.

Elector

One who enjoys the sacred privilege of voting for the man of another man’s choice.

Friendship

A ship big enough to carry two in fair weather, but only one in foul.

Future

That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.

Helpmate

A wife, or bitter half.

Hers

His.

Idiot

A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.

Insurrection

An unsuccessful revolution.

Justice

A commodity which in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.

Learning

The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.

Logic

The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

Love

A temporary insanity curable by marriage.

Marriage

The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.

Source and read on here..www.en.wikipedia.org

This a very nice site for pronunciation purposes. Write the word or phrase in the appropriate box to hear the pronunciation and hey presto! If you are using the latest version of Firefox you can add this to your toolbar.

An English Pronouncing Dictionary with Instant Sound

How do you say?

Source www.howjsay.com