‘Very’ nice…

Tags

English, Grammar

Found this on Tumblr. A nice way to improve your posts, essays, write ups. ‘Very’ nice, or must I say extremely useful, since we are looking for replacements of nice 🙂

 

Source: http://writerswrite.co.za/45-ways-to-avoid-using-the-word-very

10 commonly misunderstood words in English

Tags

English, Language, meanings, words

Found this on Pinterest:

 

One more which I can add to this list is “invaluable”. It means precious but is often thought to mean worthless!

Orals (Phew!)

Tags

Deutsch, English, exam fear, exams, German, Language, oral exam

I am back from a near death experience. Don’t go about imagining plane crashes, earthquakes or bombs please! I am back from my oral exams. OK, so this isn’t my first oral, but then I am always equally nervous at each of them. I don’t know but something about two people in front of me, sitting with the sole purpose of judging me, makes me mighty nervous.

These orals were more special because they were to be given in German…umm naturally…since they were for B2 level of German language 😛 So I lost my best ally = English language even before I entered the exam room 😦

Add to this the fact that I have not enrolled for any classroom course for these exams. I have done them all alone, because a few days back I read this:

Dont ask me why I put my faith into this person whom I haven’t even met, but I did, and went and enrolled for the exam! So now I have to wait till the next week to know if I will be happy or wise.

Umm…can I be happy please!!!!

Yeah right! (Joke)

Tags

English, Jokes, languages, Russian

 

A linguistic professor was lecturing his class the other day. “In English,” he said, “a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn’t a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative.”

A voice from the back of the room retorted, “Yeah, right!”

English is a phunny language!

Tags

English, Language

We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn’t the plural of booth be called beeth?

Then one may be that, and there would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim!

Let’s face it – English is a crazy language.
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;
Neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
English muffins weren’t invented in England.

We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes,
We find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square,
And a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write, but fingers don’t fing,
Grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham?

Doesn’t it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend?
If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them,
What do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?

Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English

Should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.
In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital?

We ship by truck but send cargo by ship…
We have noses that run and feet that smell.
We park in a driveway and drive in a parkway.
And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same,
While a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language
In which your house can burn up as it burns down,
In which you fill in a form by filling it out,
And in which an alarm goes off by going on.

And in closing……….

If Father is Pop, how come Mother’s not Mop.???