Language Trainers Blog

Now, everybody’s heard of the great bard, William Shakespeare, but perhaps not everybody knows that he was much more than just a prodigious playwright. The English language has Shakespeare to thank for a great deal more than Macbeth, Hamlet, et al.: he also invented a great number of words and phrases.

According to painstaking calculations, Shakespeare used 17,667 different words throughout all his works, and at least 1 in 10 of these words had never been used before. That’s somewhere in the region of 2,000 words that Shakespere coined himself. Among them are common terms such as lonely, excellent, submerged, countless, dwindle, hurry and hint – words without which it would be quite difficult to imagine present-day English. While it’s true that he lived in an era when the English language was going through something of a growth spurt, with new terms and ideas being invented constantly; it’s still an amazing achievement to have made such a major contribution to the language’s evolution.

He also coined many phrases throughout his plays, for example “in a pickle”, “all that glitters is not gold”, “foregone conclusion”, “one fell swoop”, “heart’s content”, “up in arms”, “vanish into thin air”, “pound of flesh” and “in the twinkling of an eye”. Perhaps it’s more a testament to his skill not so much that he invented such phrases, but that these phrases have survived to modern times.

Here’s a fantastic web site if you’re learning a language and need some help with vocabulary (or in the case of langauges with different scripts, flashcards). After selecting the language you’re learning, memrise.com helps you learn with a gardening metaphor – it teaches you new words as ‘seeds’. These ‘seeds’ are then ‘watered’ through you testing yourself via a mixture of multiple choice questions and user input. Once your ‘seeds’ are ‘watered’ enough to become ‘plants’, you’ll have to keep them blossoming by revisiting the site and redoing the tests to prove that you recognize the words/characters you’ve learned up until that point, as well as adding new ‘seeds’ to your garden. Leave your ‘plants’ alone too long and they’ll wilt.

From there, you can ‘harvest’ new ‘seeds’ (i.e. learn new words/characters) and add them to your garden. Gradually your garden grows in size, and you’ll have to keep all the plants watered by continually re-testing yourself.

This novel flashcard concept brings an element of gaming into your study, and also enables you to track your progress in a rather unique way. More importantly, the site has a community of people who can assist your learning by providing helpful mnemonics and aide-memoires if you’re having trouble committing certain words or characters to memory.

Learning Chinese characters is occasionally very interesting, but mostly an arduous process, and Memrise has really helped me expand my vocabulary. When you get something wrong, it brings up the information page on the character in question, complete with tips on how to remember it next time. It also keeps track of all the characters I’m having trouble remembering, and gives them a little more emphasis during testing. Most importantly, it forces you to reinforce your knowledge by testing yourself before your plants wilt and die.

Try it out for yourself at memrise.com!

The legendary Giacomo Casanova

This is a fantastic article about sexual eponyms – an eponym is a word derived from somebody’s name, or a place. There are hundreds of them in English, and we use them without ever thinking about their origins: for example, the Fahrenheit temperature scale is named after physicist Gabriel Fahrenheit. Likewise, a mausoleum is named after the ancient Carian leader Mausolus (Μαύσωλος), who had a huge tomb built for him by his sister and widow: now the word mausoleum refers to any grand tomb.

These eponyms, however, are more sexual in nature – words like sadism, masochism, and casanova are commonly used eponymous words, though most people simply use the words without being aware of their roots.

Here’s an excerpt from the article, interestingly-titled “the pervs behind the words” – you can read the whole article here.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

The words: masochism, sadomasochism

The obverse of a sadist is a masochist – someone who gets off on being abused – and no one could possibly deserve this label more than the person who inspired it, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Besides having a sexual fetish named after him, Sacher-Masoch is best known for writing Venus in Furs, a 19th century novel about a man’s willing submission to a cruel woman who treats him as her slave. It was based on a true story – his own. In 1869, Sacher-Masoch actually signed a contract with his mistress in which he agreed to be her slave for six months (with the stipulation that she had to allow him time to write).

The term masochism was coined during Sacher-Masoch’s lifetime, and he was understandably not pleased. The man was a great writer, feminist, and opponent of antisemitism, and yet this is how he goes down in history. It was a form of abuse that was not to his liking.

As someone who is currently learning Mandarin, I find the language very challenging – both to speak and to write – as well as extremely quirky. It is, however, a very satisfying language to learn, as it’s almost impossible to learn to speak Chinese without learning a little about Chinese culture.

One element I find especially interesting is the way Chinese combines words to form new words or phrases. A much earlier post touches on this, discussing how Chinese has to combine ideas to give names to modern concepts like the computer:

The age of the Chinese language means that it has to adapt itself to new concepts and ideas. For example, Mandarin for ‘train’ is 火车 (huǒ chē), which literally means “fire car”. Likewise, a computer – 电脑 (diànnǎo) – is an “electric brain”; and a helicopter – 直升机 (zhí shēng jī) – is a “straight-rising machine”.

However, Chinese also mixes together everyday words to bring a new meaning to the combination. Two good examples of this actually concern combining words with opposite meanings: zuǒyòu (左右) and dōngxi (东西).

On their own, zuǒ (左) and yòu (右) mean “left” and “right” respectively. Put them together, however, and you get the word for ‘about’ or ‘around’. For example, when Chinese people ask me how long I’ve been living in China, I reply “Yī nián zuǒyòu” (一年左右) – “about one year”.

Onto the second example – the individual words dōng (东) and xī (西) mean “east” and “west”, but together they form a multi-purpose word for ‘thing’. My first few months in China were plagued with me pointing at food and other objects in shops, and not knowing the word for that object, asking the shopkeeper “Zhège dōngxi shì duōshǎo qián?” (这个东西是多少钱) – “how much is this thing?”. It’s a word that I still often use, and so do most Chinese people.

The strange thing is, both of these combinations make a certain amount of sense. Sure, it’s not as literal as saying hónglǜdēng (红绿灯) for “traffic light” (literally “red green light”), but there’s a certain degree of poetry to the words.

Recently, having started learning Chinese characters, a few realizations have hit me. One of these was the word mǎshàng, which means “soon”. I never gave much thought to the word until I learned the characters: 马上. The second character, shàng (上) is a very common character with many meanings, but usually means ‘on’ or ‘next to’ (for example, the city in which I live, Shànghǎi (上海), means “next to the sea”). The first character, mǎ (马), means “horse” – so the word literally means “on a horse”.

Presumably, in ancient China, since horse was the fastest method of travel, anybody on a horse would be arriving soon. I don’t know if that’s the actual etymology, but I really want it to be!

Source: news.bbc.co.uk

“John’s chick is proper buff but she switched on her man the other day ‘cos he wanted to jam with his bred’rins instead of taking her out to the cinema. She was proper vexed and dust out. It was bare jokes.”

Be honest, how much of that did you understand? If the answer is ‘not much’, then don’t worry – you’re not alone.

A while ago, the BBC performed a small study on the slang terms used by children from schools across the United Kingdom, and found that the vocabulary used varied even more than they thought it would.

With England being such a small country in comparison to the USA, it’s often amazing to learn that their cultural and linguistic variation is just as pronounced – if not more pronounced – than on our side of the Atlantic. While a New Yorker and somebody from Alabama can understand one another without too much difficulty, the devil is in the details. Particular terms, words and phrases are the giveaway and often the obstacle that prevents total comprehension.

With children now growing up as part of the “Facebook generation”, there is even more opportunity for words and phrases to spread. Sites like Twitter can spread ideas around even faster and more efficiently than TV or music ever could. While there are many ‘universal’ phrases that have penetrated adolescent slang (for example, “LOL”), the regional differences of the slang terms most often used is surprising, and occasionally makes it extremely difficult to follow even simple conversations.

For those still curious, here’s the ‘translation’ of the above paragraph into plain English – the same paragraph was rendered using the slang of the 5 schools participating in the study. If you want to see the other 4 ‘translations’.

“John’s girlfriend is really pretty. But she got mad with him the other day because he wanted to hang out with his friends rather than take her to the cinema. She got really angry and stormed off. It was very funny.”

I’ve stumbled across this in written English many times – for when somebody wants to announce “there it is”, English borrowed the French word “voila” (not to be confused with a “viola”, the stringed instrument one size larger than a violin). “Voila” literally means “see there”, and comes to mean “there it is” or, more idiomatically, “there you have it”.

An example usage might be “I couldn’t find my glasses, until I checked my head – and voila! There they were.”

However, since it is a word you rarely see written out – and being French has a slightly unexpected spelling for English speakers – people have been spelling it somewhat phonetically, resulting in the word being seen as “walla” or “wallah”. While both of these words do exist, their meanings are very different from the intended “voila”.

“Walla” is a word used in American English to describe the background noise of a crowd murmuring, usually on a movie set. It’s called such because moviemakers discovered that background actors could easily recreate the sound of background conversation just by repeating the word “walla” over and over again to each other. There are different variations of this in different countries – in the UK they use the word “rhubarb”, in Germany “rabarber”, and in Japan “gaya”.

“Wallah” is also an Arabic word meaning something along the lines of “really”, and is used when a speaker wants to express that what they are saying or what they have just said is indeed true. It’s literal meaning is “(I swear) by Allah”.

So there you have it. If you want to say “there it is”, use voila. If you want to mimic the background noise of American English speakers in conversation, use walla. And if you want to declare that something is the truth in Arabic, use wallah.

Et voila! There you have it.

My last “annoyances” post about confusing wreck and wreak made me think a little about other words that are often confused with each other in daily use.

A lot of the confusion seems to stem from the fact that one of the words is used in an English idiom – a set phrase, for example – which has old, often forgotten roots. This word may be similar to another, far more common word. If you first experience these idioms without seeing it written down, it’s easy to associate it with a more common word.

So, as I explained last time, is the case with wreck and wreak – for most of us, the English idiom “to wreak havoc” is pretty much the only time when you’ll come across the word. If you had never seen the word written down, it’s not completely outside the realms of possibility that wreck could be the spelling for wreak. Or, conversely, if you had seen it written down, it also wouldn’t be ridiculous to think that wreak was a mis-spelling of wreck, since both words are involved when talking about destruction.

So, confusion in these cases is relatively easy. Here are some other word pairs that are often confused:

“This really piqued my interest” – the word pique means to excite. Not to be confused with peaked, meaning to reach the top.

“To whet the appetite” – while the phrase might include your mouth watering (and so you could be forgiven for thinking it’s “wet the appetite”), that’s not the origin of the phrase. To whet something means to sharpen it, and so also comes to mean to make it keen or eager.

“Waiting with bated breath” – often confused for baited, which means to lure. To bate something is to moderate or to restrain: so the phrase actually means to hold your breath.

“Moot point” gives rise to a particularly common error, as it is often confused with the incorrect “mute point”. The words sound similar, but the meanings are actually almost opposites. A moot is a discussion, usually of a hypothetical point; and the adjective moot means “open to discussion”. So, a moot point means that something is debatable. Mute, meaning “silent”, has nothing to do with the phrase.

“To pore over a book” means to study it intently – “to pour over a book” would… probably ruin it.

Finally, an error that is becoming so common that some could probably argue that it is now ‘standard’ English: when somebody wants to agree with something somebody else has said, they might say “hear, hear” – NOT “here, here“. The phrase has something of an interesting history – it is actually a short form of “hear him, hear him”, and came into popular usage because it was often used as a way for politicians in one of England’s parliamentary buildings, the House of Commons, as a way for people to agree with whatever had just been said. Since traditionally you are not allowed to applaud in the chambers of the House of Commons, it became standard to shout “hear him, hear him”, or more simply, “hear, hear“.

Just a short post here about something that either I’ve been hearing more often as of late, or simply been noticing more often: the difference between the words wreck and wreak.

Wreak is almost always only heard in the popular idiom “to wreak havoc”, which means to inflict devastation or damage to something or someone. You can also say “to wreak anger”, which means to let loose your anger on somebody, e.g. “He wreaked his anger on the children”. It’s pronounced the same as the word reek (meaning to smell strongly).

Wreck is used far more often, usually related to traffic accidents, and simply means a thing that has been ruined or broken: a car wreck, building wreckage, shipwreck etc. It’s pronounced as it looks, with a silent “w”: rek.

For example, “the recent earthquake in Japan wreaked havoc and caused a great number of wrecked homes”.

In the last week I’ve heard more than one person say “wreck havoc”, which made me think that perhaps these words, though their meanings are somewhat related in meaning, are often confused with one another.

Source: vanityfair.com

I came across a very interesting (if slightly old) article on the Vanity Fair site recently on the “like” pandemic in American English. Perhaps most noticeable in female Californians’ accents, some see the over and misuse of “like” as a scourge on the English language, some simply as a harmless form of teen slang, others see it as the way the language is evolving.

Christopher Hitchens talks not only of how the word has pervaded the daily vocabulary of American teens, but also how it has near enough completely replaced the use of the word “as” when forming similes or comparisons.

Here’s a quote from the article; you can read the whole thing here.

So it can be of use to a natural raconteur. Ian McEwan rather surprised me when I asked him about “like,” telling me that “it can be used as a pause or a colon: very handy for spinning out a mere anecdote into a playlet that’s full of parody and speculation.” And also of hyperbole, as in “She’s been out with, like, a million guys.”

Its other main use is principally social, and defensive. You will have noticed the way in which “uptalk” has also been spreading among the young. “Uptalk” can be defined as an ostensibly declarative sentence that is uttered on a rising note of apology and that ends with an implied question mark. An example: the statement “I go to Columbia University?,” which seems to say, “If that’s all right with you.” Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting “O.K.” has deposed the more affirmative “Yes,” so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of “like” are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness. To report that “he was like, Yeah, whatever” is to struggle to say “He said” while minimizing the risk of commitment.

Source: physorg.com

Cambridge Dictionaries Online have revealed that the top searches by English learners were generally English idiomatic phrases and slang – which are so often hard for learners due to old or strange origins. As such, they are difficult to teach, but if a foreigner can master a handful of them, it can make a great difference in how fluent their English seems.

Phrases such as “eat your heart out” (used in jest to say that someone is better), “right you are” (expressing agreement), “catch a few rays” (to sunbathe) and “no mean feat” (a worthy or great achievement) were among the most searched idioms.

Strangely enough, the top search term was the word “dictionary” – you’d think that people would have had a hard time finding the CDO site without knowing what that word meant!

You can read the full article from physorg.com here.