January 3, 2008

Beware New Clothes

In this season of New Year's resolutions, I came across a timely quote from Thoreau's Walden.
I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. (via 43 Folders)
My "new clothes" tend to be organization systems: software, gadgets, and even paper calenders and such. This year is the first time in quite a while that I sticking with the same system, a pocket calendar/notebook for personal things and an online calendar/task list for work. Maybe I'll spend less time "getting organized" and more time doing real stuff. Here's hoping anyway.

What kind of "new clothes" lure you?

January 1, 2008

"The Mother Tongue"

I just finished reading "The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way" by Bill Bryson (thanks Molly!). He writes knowledgeably and hilariously about the history of the language from the Indo-European roots to Cockney rhyming slang and everything in between. As a teacher in Japan, I was particularly interested in the passages that explain why English is so tough to pick up as a second language. He writes of how "no other language in the world has more words spelled the same way and yet pronounced so differently," giving the following list of paired words as an example. Phonics can only take a student so far.
heard--beard
road--broad
five--give
fillet--skillet
early--dearly
beau--beauty
steak--streak
ache--mustache
low--how
doll--droll
scour--four
four--tour
grieve--sieve
paid--said
break--speak
Here's another list that illustrates the difficulty of English spelling. "See if you can tell which of the following words are mispelled."
supercede
conceed
procede
idiosyncracy
concensus
accomodate
impressario
irresistable
rhythym
opthalmologist
diptheria
anamoly
afficianado
caesarian
grafitti

Click the comments link below to check your answer.

And here's a list of British and American synonyms. Cover the column of the country you are most familiar with and see how many words you know. (The list was designed for Americans so British will probably have an easier time of it. And sorry if the table looks weird; I can't get it to look quite right.)

British

American

Cot

Baby’s crib

Cotton (for sewing)

Thread (for sewing)

Courgette

Zucchini

To skive

To loaf

Candy floss

Cotton candy

Full stop (punctuation)

Period (punctuation)

Inverted commas

Quotation marks

Berk

Idiot, boor

Joiner

Skilled carpenter

Knackered

Worn out

Number plate

License plate

Old Bill

Policeman

Scarper

Run away

To chivvy

To hurry along

Subway

Pedestrian underpass

Pantechnicon

Furniture removal truck

Flyover

Vehicle overpass

Leading article

Newspaper editorial

Fruit machine

One-armed bandit

Smalls

Ladies’ underwear

Coach

Long-distance bus

Spiv

Petty thief

To grizzle

To whine

To hump

To carry a heavy load

Despite having a degree in English literature and having worked with British colleagues for several years, I only knew eight of the British words.

Just to show how Bryson combines scholarship and humor, here is what he writes near the end of a section about how the 60-million-word Oxford English dictionary came into being:

But perhaps the most notable of all the OED's minor quirks is its inistence that Shakespeare should be spelled Shakspere. After explaining at some length why this is the only correct spelling, it grudgingly acknowledges that the commonest spelling "is perh. Shakespeare." (To which we might add, it cert. is.)

If you're interested in this book, check it out on amazon with this link. And don't forget to check the comments below to see how many of those words were spelled incorrectly.