New Resources - Mexico Information and Learning Languages

We've added three new links to our blog page to help bring more information to TEFL job seekers and foreign language learners, starting in Mexico City.

Mexico City: An Opinionated Guide by American Jim Johnston, living in Mexico City.

Chilangish invites expats to contribute to what is a bloggy feature magazine covering Mexico City and events, giving the lay of the land to the new arrival.

On the language front, we've added Fluent in 3 Months, a blog that covers the amazing round-the-world journeys of Benny Lewis. We are impressed with his abilities to pick up languages through talent and hard work.

US English in the UK

American English has long influenced UK English, and sometimes to the ire of the English. Here's a BBC story.

Lengthy. Reliable. Talented. Influential. Tremendous.

All of these words we use without a second thought were never part of the English language until the establishment of the United States.

The Americans imported English wholesale, forged it to meet their own needs, then exported their own words back across the Atlantic to be incorporated in the way we speak over here. Those seemingly innocuous words caused fury at the time.

The poet Coleridge denounced "talented" as a barbarous word in 1832, though a few years later it was being used by William Gladstone. A letter-writer to the Times, in 1857, described "reliable" as vile.

Ugly and pointless new usages appear in the media and drift into everyday conversation:
Faze, as in "it doesn't faze me"
Hospitalize, which really is a vile word
Wrench for spanner
Elevator for lift
Rookies for newcomers, who seem to have flown here via the sports pages.
Guy, less and less the centrepiece of the ancient British festival of 5 November - or, as it will soon be known, 11/5. Now someone of either gender.
And, starting to creep in, such horrors as ouster, the process of firing someone, and outage, meaning a power cut. I always read that as outrage. And it is just that.

I am all for a living, breathing language that evolves with the times. I accept that estate agents prefer to sell apartments rather than flats - they sound more enticing. I accept that we now have freight trains rather than goods trains - that's more accurate.

TEFL Job Alert - Mexico City

Part time hours have come up for teaching business English classes in the Polanco are through a local language institute. Mornings only. If interested, drop us a line at Teachers Latin America.

Job Alert - Queretaro, Mexico

3 positions teaching business level English have opened for immediate starts in Queretaro, Mexico. Contact Teachers Latin America for details. www.innovative-english.com