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.

National. Punctuation; "Day"

September 24th is National Punctuation Day. Period.

http://www.nationalpunctuationday.com

Now get out there and punctuate something!

New Words for the Dictionary

From the Buzz Log by Mike Krumboltz

The English language is always evolving. There was a time when words like email, x-ray, and d'oh were nowhere to be found in the dictionary. Today, we add a few more new words to the tome.

The bookworms behind the Oxford Dictionary of English recently released a list of 2,000 or so new words that will be added to their next edition. Some of the new words include staycation, social media, and the groan-inducing chillax.

The list sparked massive interest on the Web and, we can safely assume, a lot of questions from folks who don't know a staycation from a vacation, or a bromance from a romance. (FYI: A staycation is like a vacation, but you stay at home and save money. And a bromance is a "close but non-sexual relationship between two men.")

Perhaps the most high-profile word to be added to the dictionary this year is vuvuzela. For those who slept through the World Cup, a vuvuzela is the one-note plastic horn that creates a horrendously annoying sound. That's our definition. The official one, via the Oxford Dictionary of English, is a bit more balanced: "A long plastic instrument, in the shape of a trumpet, which makes a very loud noise when you blow it and is popular with football fans in South Africa."

Some other popular additions include frenemy ("a person with whom one is friendly despite a fundamental dislike or rivalry"), cheeseball ("lacking taste, style or originality"), and wardrobe malfunction ("an instance of a person accidentally exposing an intimate part of their body as result of an article of clothing slipping out of position.")

Frankly, we're amazed it took so long for that last term to make it into the dictionary. Thanks to Janet Jackson, Paris Hilton, and other Hollywood stars, it's been part of the public discourse for years.

Next TEFL Course - August 30th

Next TEFL Course runs August 30th to September 11th. Sign up today at www.innovative-english.com

Philospophy, Spiderman, and EFL

An interesting story on the BBC caught our collective eye, about the use of popular comics such as Spidermaan and Batman at university level philosophy courses. Comics are also widely used by EFL teachers working abroad with children as visually stimulating storyboards make learning both fun and effective. Now, the EFL teacher can bring morality and ethical questions into the mix, but perhaps for a bit older student.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10900068

For years, fans of the Batman comics have puzzled over a mystery at the heart of the series: why doesn't Batman just kill his arch-nemesis, the murderous Joker?

The two have engaged in a prolonged game of cat-and-mouse. The Joker commits a crime, Batman catches him, the Joker is locked up, and then invariably escapes.

Wouldn't all this be much simpler if Batman just killed the Joker? What's stopping him?

Enter philosopher Immanuel Kant and the deontological theory of ethics.

At least, that's how the discussion progresses in a growing number of philosophy classes in the US.

Cultural and media studies have paved the way for universities to incorporate pop culture into their curriculum. These days it is not uncommon to find a television studies class alongside 17th-Century literature in the course listings of an English department.

Now, philosophy professors are finding superheroes and comic books to be exceptionally useful tools in helping students think about the complex moral and ethical debates that have occupied philosophers for centuries.

Read the rest of the story at the link above and remember - with great power comes great responsibility.