Language Trainers Blog

You may not be aware already, but we have our own Language Trainers account on Twitter, which updates every time a new blog entry is posted here.

However, recently we’ve decided to start running a “Word of the Day” tweet. Every weekday we are posting a word and its definition, so if you follow us you’ll be able to expand your English vocabulary with ease (as well as be the first to know when the blog is updated!).

So, if you’d like to subscribe to our Twitter feed, simply visit our page while logged in to your Twitter account, and click the “Follow” link!

Source: blog.forbes.com

Sarah Palin is one of my favorite public figures. Hate her or love her, you can’t but help enjoy her little snafus. Lately it’s been this word “refudiate”, first laid down in a tweet written by Palin concerning plans to build a mosque within 2 blocks of Ground Zero. Did she mean “refute”? Or “repudiate”? Did she mean a mixture of the two?

Is this clumsy ignorance on her part? Or is she, as she claims, finding time within the confines of a sensitive argument to coin new English words in the same way that Shakespeare did?

Who knows. But I can’t but help enjoy the show.

One thing that angers me about the current situation in the Gulf of Mexico is BP’s constant use of euphemisms to downplay the severity of the disaster.

The main – and most anger-inducing – one of these is continually referring to it as an “oil spill”. It is most certainly not a spill. According to dictionary.com, a “spill” is:

spill verb
(of a liquid, loose particles, etc.) to run or escape from a container, esp. by accident or in careless handling.

This is not oil escaping from a container – this is oil escaping from a well. Pedants may argue that a well is a container or sorts, but the main difference here is that “spill” implies that it is a finished event – if you spill a glass of milk, the spill is limited to how much milk was in the glass.

However, when the ocean awash with millions upon millions of gallons of oil that is still spilling, it is a leak.

At least we can all agree on one word that describes the situation: a disaster.

This is an old video, but I thought it was still funny, and related to my previous post about slang.

Hugh Laurie – better known to us as Dr. House from the hit TV show, has a little friendly quiz with Ellen Degeneres on her show to see who knows more of one another’s culture’s slang phrases.

I recently came across this online – taken straight from a section of a Russian text book discussing the American slang term “son of a gun”:

Imagine if we really did talk like this! The third example in particular made me laugh out loud: “This is a really son of a gun job”. Huh?

As somebody who studied Latin and Ancient Greek, I’ve always been interested in etymology – the study of where words come from.

This image caught my attention whilst browsing the other day, showing the foundations of the English word “mother”. Click it to see the full sized version:

It’s a little confusing at first, being that it’s an approximate map of Europe with a big tree on it – but if you start from the right hand side and work your way along the tree’s roots, you can see how the stem worked its way across Europe and how the word for ‘mother’ in each language eventually took shape.

It makes sense that the word ‘mother’ comes from the root of the Sanskrit word ‘to make’ (mata), and it’s interesting to see how the word maintained a lot of its original form in every language.

This fascinating picture was drawn by a Hendrik Willem van Loon (1882-1944), a prolific Dutch-American journalist and historian, and former professor of history at Cornell University.

At one time, Latin was the official academic language in Europe. Until the early 18th century, the vast majority of all academic and scientific texts were written in Latin. This was primarily due to Latin’s traditional status as a language for educated people, but also because the nature of the language allowed both accuracy and simplicity – the perfect language for explaining concepts both simple and complex.

As Latin’s popularity faded, academics started to write in their native language instead, but since there were many set phrases in Latin that were both convenient and well-known, a few survived – usually in abbreviated form, like e.g. and i.e., which were covered in an older post. Most of these will probably be recognizable; but how many of the original forms did you know?

A.M. – ante meridiem – “before midday”
Cf. – confer – “compare”
C.V. – curriculum vitae – “course of life”
Etc. – et cetera – “and the others” (things)
Et al. – et alii – “and others” (people)
M.O. – modus operandi – “method of operating”
N.B. – nota bene – “note well” (or “please note”)
Percent – per cent – “for every one hundred”
R.I.P – requiescat in pace – “may he/she rest in peace”
Vs. – versus – “against”

In older texts, etc. is sometimes abbreviated with an ampersand – &c – if you look at it carefully, the & symbol is nothing more than a slightly compressed “E” and “t” (et being the Latin word for “and”).

It just goes to show that while Latin is considered a ‘dead language’, its influence can still be seen in our everyday lives.

This is just a small selection of Latin abbreviations still in use today – do you know any others?

Source: waywardclassics.blogspot.com

I found this hilarious post today about badly translated Latin tattoos (some NSFW language).

Why would anybody permanently mark their body with a slogan without making sure the translation was correct first? Some of them even leave English words in – a nice juxtaposition of modern parlance and a 2000+ year old language, or pretentious and lazy? You decide.

People – if you feel the need to get a tattoo of something in another language… never ever trust that Google Translate is going to be up for the job. Check with a native speaker!

This isn’t so much of an annoyance, but in the age of the internet it seems to be such a common error that it’s worth a mention. Of course, 99.9% of people could not care less if the correct form of the word is used, but what kind of pedant would I be if I let it go unchecked? Answer: a very poor one.

So, disc vs disk – which is which? The answer is actually simpler than you might think.

A compact disc (CD) are read using a laser – that is to say, optically. A hard disk, on the other hand, is read magnetically. And believe it or not, that is it.

So, if data is reproduced optically, it’s disc with a C; and if magnetically, disk with a K. Therefore, it’s compact disc, but floppy disk.

I suppose this makes British author Terry Pratchet‘s Discworld series syntactically correct – since you read the books with your eyes!

Learning a new language can be helped by your own understanding of English grammar – most people who have English as their primary language learn it ‘as-is’ – that is, without truly ever being explained the grammatical or morphological reasons behind things.

I studied Latin and Ancient Greek since a young age. While this doesn’t exactly make me immediately popular at parties, it has helped me recognise word forms, even if I hadn’t seen a word before.

One of the things that helps the most is recognising prefixes – those bits that are commonly attached to the beginning of words which give you a clue to their meaning (if you know what they mean, of course). Due to English’s wealth of linguistic sources, we tend to use a lot of prefixes – but the vast majority come from Latin or Ancient Greek.

You may be familiar with most of the numerical prefixes, such as kilo- for thousand (Gk. chilioi / χιλιοι), mega- for million (Gk. μέγας – “large”), cent- for hundred (Lat. centum), or nano- for a billionth (Gk. νᾶνος – “dwarf”).

A pretty comprehensive list of prefixes (and other word bases) can be found here, if you’d like to learn more.

So then, the first time I heard one of my all-time favourite words, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis – which, even though it is basically something of a linguistic hoax, is referred to in the Oxford English Dictionary – it sounded pretty much like nonsense. But once I saw it written down I noticed that it was basically a bunch of Latin and Greek prefixes and suffixes thrown together to make one long word. Break it down into its parts and you get:

pneu- Gk. meaning “breath”
-mono- Gk. meaning “one/alone”
-ultra- Lat. meaning “beyond”
-micro- Gk. meaning “small”
-scopic- Gk. meaning “looking”
-silico- Gk. meaning “rock/sand”
-volcano- Lat. meaning “volcano” (from Vulcan, the God of fire)
-coni- Gk. meaning “dust” (from konis)
-osis Gk. meaning “condition”

So when I found out that the word was supposed to mean “a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust, causing inflammation in the lungs”, it almost made sense.