The tail of the tale or the tale of the tail?

Recently, I had to write a long text in English and when I went through it before sending it (I always have to double-check my spelling) I came across an old mistake of mine, which I thought I had managed to get rid of over the years. The mistake was the good old see-sea homophone mix up. Homophones are words that sound the same but are spelt differently and mean completely different things. The two (or sometimes more) words do sound exactly the same and when I(*_) write (right?) I automatically say the things I'm writing so sometimes I confuse things a bit. Even the inbuilt spell-checks cannot correct these things because the pairs of the homophones (see-sea, war-wore, write-right, sale-sail...) are both in the dictionary.














(picture from here)

Have you read Alice in Wonderland? Do you remember the "Mouse's tale" ? In the story the mouse says: "Mine is a long and a sad tale!" Alice thinks the mouse means a 'sad tail' and she is very surprised. So, Lewis Caroll had to come up with a nice, long, winding tail-poem. It seems that homophone mix-ups do have their uses, after all.


Do you find anything strange with the following sentences? Can you correct the mistakes in them?

Yesterday she died her hair.
Have you bought the meet?
There car is bigger than ours.
She stepped on the break but the car didn't stop.
Witch one is your watch?
The whether is awful today.
Piece, brother!
You have very week mussels!
Sir Robin is a very brave night.
That's hour house, over there.

(You can find the key here.)

Words often confused

Well, this new post is not a puzzle. For a change, I decided to blog about a real EFL topic: words that can be confused. However, if you don't feel like practising vocabulary, never mind, come back this Sunday for the new puzzle.

There are some words in English that resemble other words simply too much. The difference in meaning is usually not proportional to the small difference in the form. One or two letters can make or break a sentence. For example, speaking of an 'economic car' would not make too much sense, whereas an 'economical car' actually means something: a car which is cheap to operate and maintain. Word pairs such as lie-lay , beside-besides , affect-effect or desert-dessert should be familiar to all foreign learners of English above intermediate level. But there are other traps similar to these. In fact, there are lots and lots of words in English that can be confused, and some of them are occasionally mixed up even by native speakers. There is a very handy site, where you can spend some time on improving or testing your knowledge about these words. The thing that I especially like about this site is that the verbs are tested in all (or at least several) of their various forms.

And if you are still here you surely deserve this nice dessert:













(picture from here)

Incredible Amazing Awesome Fantastic Super Great

One of the most challenging things in teaching a foreign language is to widen a student's vocabulary, especially to get them to use a bigger variety of adjectives. Once they have learned 'good', 'nice' and 'interesting' they seem to be absolutely satisfied with the choice of adjectives they have. Sometimes I 'ban' these words for one or two lessons to make my students leave the comfort and ease of the 'nice-good-interesting' territory. An advanced student of mine (no doubt remembering this struggle for synonyms) has recently showed me a video and asked me if this was what I had meant by using as many synonyms as possible. What could I have said? Well, it seems overdoing it a bit, but yes, the message gets delivered here. You could even say that it gets hammered in, I suppose. Especially if you use each of them ten times.

Slang II (British English and American English)

Despite the differences in vocabulary and pronunciation, American and British people tend to understand each other without major difficulties. I do remember getting a few raised eyebrows when I inadvertently spoke of 'rented flats' or 'pissed blokes' to my American friends who were not familiar with the British dialect (In Am. English these would be 'rented apartment' and 'drunk guy'). Yet, these misunderstandings don't seem to be paralyzing. What about slang? How much do they understand of the other nation's slang? From this video it seems that not too much. Ellen invited Hugh Laurie to her show and they had a slang knowledge contest. The expressions they present are not very widely used and the 'contestants' seem to be having good fun trying to find out their meanings. If you are not a native speaker of English this script may help you a lot but I suggest that you listen to the video first to see how much of it you can understand without the text.





Now check your slang knowledge with this simple quiz based on the video:

British and American slang quiz » Free Online Quizzes

And if you are still here you surely deserve another video where Hugh Laurie has an 'unspoilt' British accent, a funny surname and hidden tapdancing abilities.

Slang (Part I) - Rhyming Slang

A couple of days ago I came across this news article:

"A cash machine operator has introduced Cockney rhyming slang to a number of its ATMs in east London.

People using Bank Machine's ATMs can opt to have their prompts and options given to them in rhyming slang.

As a result they will be asked to enter their Huckleberry Finn, rather than their Pin, and will have to select how much sausage and mash (cash) they want.

The rhyming slang prompts will be available from five cash machines in east London for three months.

Other rhyming slang prompts people can expect include a speckled hen (£10), while the machine may inform users that it is contacting their rattle and tank, rather than bank." (read the whole story and listen to locals' opinion here)

So, what is Cockney rhyming slang? This is a special encryption that makes it possible for the speakers to completely confuse outsiders. Instead of saying, for instance, "Let's go up the stairs" the user of rhyming slang would say "Let's go up the apples." This comes from 'apples and pears' where you drop the second (the actual rhyming) word. The exact origins of the phrase are unknown. Probably, the shape of the apple and pear stalls at the market reminded somebody of stairs. Despite the nice image, once you have dropped the rhyming part it gets really difficult to find out the meaning. (Note for foreign learners of English: The word 'pear' rhymes with 'stair' or 'wear' and not with 'hear'!)

My personal favourite is 'Dog and Bone' used for a telephone. The classical telephone's receiver really had a bone-like look to it and the 'dog' really seemed to be clinging onto it.














'Dog and Bone' (from here)

Sometimes, especially with longer words, the whole expression is used. So, if someone asks you: "Would you Adam and Eve this?" you should encode it as "Would you believe it?". Although this slang originated from the East End of London, some of the expressions have become quite widespread in other parts of Britain, too. For example, the expression 'use your loaf' comes from 'loaf of bread' ( which means 'head' in rhyming slang).

Do this quiz to check and improve your rhyming slang knowledge:

Cockney Rhyming Slang » Test maker

Feeling Good

Summer is here. (Well, according to the calendar, anyway. I hope the weather will catch up soon.) It is time to feel good, relax a bit and leave the more scientific topics behind for a couple of weeks. The main feature of this week's post is a song. I first heard it some years ago at a friend's party. It was dawn and most of the folks had already left or had fallen asleep. A few of us were still up and we were just chilling out. Then suddenly there was this woman singing from a CD and I became wide awake. What a great song and what a voice! It was Nina Simone singing the song 'Feeling Good'. Since then, I have heard this song many times in many different versions but this one still remains to be my favourite.



















Nina Simone (picture from here)

Nina Simone (Eunice Kathleen Waymon) was a Grammy-award winner singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger and civil right activist. She was trained as a classical pianist and started singing only later in her career, when she got a job as a bar musician. (According to a legend, the bar's owner told her that playing the piano was not enough and she had to sing as well - big thanks to the anonymous owner.) She is mainly classified as a jazz musician although her style is a mixture of blues, jazz, classical music, folk music, RnB and gospel. She took on her stage name because she didn't want her mother to know that she played the "devil's music". Her songs have been used in many motion picture soundtracks (e.g. The Big Lebowski, Notting Hill, Sex and the City...) and many artists (e.g. Aretha Franklin, David Bowie, The Animals...) have covered her work. Now, let's listen to the song!





You can read the lyrics of the song here. After the text of the lyrics you will find a very easy exercise to revise the words of the song :-)