2008 October | Language Trainers UK Blog

Happy Hallowe'en!

October 31, 2008 at 10:45 pm · Filed under Chinese, Cultural differences, English · Posted by Wendy

I really couldn’t think of a reasonable excuse to write about Hallowe’en today, but I wanted to because I like the holiday. Not necessarily the excuse to dress up and get ridiculously drunk, but I’m sure that appeals to some people.

Yesterday I tried to work a Hallowe’en-themed warm up into an English lesson (although there was absolutely no link to the rest of the material I was teaching). My aim was to get the students to discuss the last time they’d dressed up as something, describe their costumes, etc. Unfortunately, people in China don’t do fancy dress. I had a sneaking suspicion that this was the case, but wanted to talk about October 31st anyway. My mistake. There aren’t any celebrations that involve dressing up as something/someone else (just yourself in your best new clothes), and I guess it’s related to the fact that people used to, and still do, spend a lot of their money on essentials like food and shelter rather than flimsy costumes and unnecessary amounts of confectionery. And thinking about that made me feel like a bit of a jerk. I’m glad I like All Hallow’s Eve more for its pagan roots than for its modern consumerist leanings.

Well, all those links were tentative at best. I’ll finish off by wishing you easily-removable face paint and the willpower not to eat all your candy at once. Happy Hallowe’en!

Permalink Comments

Willy-nilly

October 31, 2008 at 7:26 am · Filed under English, Etymology, Pronunciation · Posted by Wendy

I was looking at some online resources aimed at helping people improve their English pronunciation when I came across the word ‘nill’, which was used as an example of how to pronounce the sound /ɪ/ (as in bit). I didn’t know if this was a misspelling of the word ‘nil’ (meaning zero or nothing), or a word I’d never heard of, so of course I looked it up. Using trusty old dictionary.com, I was informed that the word ‘nill‘ was an archaic verb, meaning to be unwilling, will not, or to refuse (something).

This led to the phrase ‘will he, nill he’ (or ‘will ye, nill ye’), which means ‘whether he is willing or not’. This in turn morphed into the phrase ‘willy-nilly‘, which is still used today. ‘Willy-nilly’ is generally used to describe something that is disorganised, unplanned, or generally ‘all over the place’, but it still has a secondary (but rare) meaning that is related to the original form, which is basically ‘whether you like it or not’.

So if you ever hear someone say ‘you’ll have to do it willy-nilly’, don’t assume that it means they want you to do a shoddy job. Unfortunately, they probably mean that you’ll have to do the task whether you want to or not.

Permalink Comments

Up the garden path

October 30, 2008 at 6:23 pm · Filed under English, Grammar · Posted by Wendy

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned an experiment that found that people have a good try at predicting what a speaker is about to say, and this makes it easier for us to keep up with the rapid pace of conversation.

I also mentioned the mental stumbling blocks caused by hearing something that we haven’t predicted. This is demonstrated by a particular kind of structure called a ‘garden path’ sentence. The way that these sentences are written intentionally misleads the reader or listener, or ‘leads them up the garden path’. Unusual phrasing and parsing (dividing up the sentence) make the audience expect or predict something different from what they end up hearing.

A good example of a garden path sentence is “The girl told the story cried.” We expect the girl to be the one telling the story, but it turns out that she was the listener. Writing the sentence using “the girl who was told” gets rid of any ambiguity, but takes all the fun out of it.

A few of the better ones that I’ve seen:

We painted the wall with cracks.
When Fred eats food gets thrown.
The prime number few.
Fat people eat accumulates.
The man who hunts ducks out on weekends.
The old man the boat.
The man whistling tunes pianos.
The dog that I had really loved bones.

I don’t think they’re too hard to work out, so I’m not going to post the less-ambiguous versions. Leave a comment if you need the answers, though!

Permalink Comments

On the edge of your brain

October 29, 2008 at 7:20 am · Filed under Biological, Hints and Tips, Observations · Posted by Wendy

I had one of those days today where I left the house and managed to forget my watch, a jumper, my lunch, my vitamins… At least I remembered my keys and my bus money, I suppose. It got me thinking about memory, though, and something I heard recently about the storage of memories in the brain.

There are still a lot of mysteries associated with the biology of the brain, but it seems that when consolidating memories and information, the more often we think something, the stronger the neural pathway will become. We can liken this to a track being worn further into the ground every time you walk over it. Eventually we will go from a learning stage to a knowing stage, and the memory or idea will become physically impressed on our brains.

For this reason, it’s been advised that if you are trying to remember something (in one of those ‘it’s on the tip of my tongue!’ situations), it’s best to just not think about it. If you keep thinking ‘I can’t remember [something]‘, then you will reinforce that idea, and it may actually get in the way of the recall that you’re after.

I was trying to list all the things that I’d forgotten this morning, and couldn’t remember ‘lunch’ (yet another thing I forgot today). A couple of minutes after I stopped trying to remember, it came to me. Now I won’t forget that I forgot my lunch today. Hopefully this means that I won’t forget lunch again tomorrow!

Language Trainers Blog

Any language, any time, anywhere.

Archive for October, 2008

Happy Hallowe'en!

Willy-nilly

Up the garden path

On the edge of your brain