Donald's English Classroom

Paddywhack

01/03/2020 by admin

In September, I mentioned that I’d been writing a weekly Fun Facts About English series, and my original goal was to produce 50 posts. This week, I’m at number 38 with a topic that I’m pleased to re-encounter. I thought I’d share it as a regular post with some added personal history.

Kinney Brothers Publishing Fun Facts About English 38

One year in late October, I introduced the song, This Old Man, to my kindergarten students for the December talent show (お遊戯会); a tune unfamiliar to my Japanese colleagues at the time. The Encho (Director) grilled me oh-so-condescendingly about the meaning of certain lyrics like ‘nick-nack paddywhack,’ stating she had to explain the meaning to parents who ‘desperately wanted to know.’ In those pre-Internet days, I had few avenues for such research. The best I could say was that the words were largely nonsensical though rhythmic word-plays meant for children. The Encho escalated the issue wanting to strike the song from the program when an amazing thing happened. In December, This Old Man appeared in a catchy television commercial and poof! the controversy went away. With the song included in the talent show, it created the appearance that the kindergarten had its finger on the timely pulse of popular culture. I was off the hook and, by the time of the show, everybody was humming the tune.

Since then, I’ve done my research.

The Fun Fact above collapses two very separate periods of history regarding This Old Man, as the rhyme itself goes back hundreds of years, long before hitting a linguistic and cultural pothole in the Victorian era.

Besides a slap or a sharp blow, paddywhack also refers to the tough neck ligament found in many four-legged animals such as sheep and cattle. Even today, this chewy and protein-rich ligament is often sold as a dried dog treat.

This Old Man
This old man,
He played one,
He played nick-nack on my thumb,
With a nick-nack paddywhack,
Give a dog a bone,
This old man came rolling home.

Though it’s difficult to determine the exact meaning of the Old English counting rhyme, there are clues as to what it may be referring. One is “nick-nack” and the practice of “playing the bones.”

After a feast of lamb or swine, the Irish would fashion the animal’s rib bones into a musical instrument held between the fingers and clacked together, aka playing the bones. This evolved into the more contemporary playing of spoons. Nick-nack refers to the clacking sound of the bones, much like we say rat-a-tat-tat for the sound of a drum.

It’s also important to note that bones used in this musical fashion dates back to ancient China, Egypt, Greece, and Rome.

English timeline Kinney Brothers Publishing

As for a ‘severe beating,’ though recent interpretations point to Victorian (1840s) slang and giving an Irishman (Paddy) a whack, paddywhack’s much older etymology connects the word to paxwax, the Old English term for an animal’s nuchal ligament. The word whack, meaning to strike forcefully, doesn’t appear until the early 18th century and may be derivative of the Middle English word thwack, as in “I shall thwack him senseless!” Paddy, as in “an Irishman,” is from the late 18th century and is a derisive nickname for the proper Irish name Patrick (Pádraic, Pádraig, Páraic). In short, paddywhack, Paddy, and whack have completely separate etymologies.*

On the other hand, it’s easily imagined that the long, elastic paddywhack of an animal could be used as an instrument of discipline – much like ‘getting a switchin’ with a tree switch, or a ‘paddlin’ with a wooden paddle. Ouch!

Be sure to check out the three videos below – living proof our ancient musical and linguistic history is still alive!

Check out Dom Flemons on his Youtube channel!

George Gilmore – Akron, Ohio

Check out Abby The Spoon Lady on her Youtube channel!

As always, best of luck in your classes!

Donald Kinney
Kinney Brothers Publishing

*When researching This Old Man, it was shocking to find some wildly speculative theories on the origins of the song. One lengthy Reddit thread suggested that the song was about a perverted old man who played sexually provocative games on children’s body parts. Another blogger made a clumsy (and flat-out wrong) assertion that the song was about poor and starving Irish who traveled in wagons selling knickknacks and the English who would rather give a dog a bone than give money to a “Paddy.”

We must be very careful about what people may imagine as opposed to what historical research can actually tell us. Though paddywhack is now incontrovertibly linked to Victorian-era animosities, its origins are far more culturally rich and enjoyable.

Fun Facts About English #38 – Paddywhack

01/03/2020 by admin

This Fun Fact collapses two very separate periods of history regarding This Old Man, as the rhyme itself goes back hundreds of years, long before hitting a linguistic and cultural pothole in the Victorian era.

Paddywhack Kinney Brothers Publishing — Dried beef paddywhack. Target

This Old Man
This old man,
He played one,
He played nick-nack on my thumb,
With a nick-nack paddywhack,
Give a dog a bone,
This old man came rolling home.

Though it is difficult to determine the exact meaning of the Old English counting rhyme, there are clues as to what it may be referring. One is “nick-nack” and the practice of “playing the bones.”

Playing the Bones Kinney Brothers Publishing — Playing The Bones – Wikipedia

It’s also important to note that bones used in this musical fashion dates back to ancient China, Egypt, Greece, and Rome.

Be sure to check out the three videos below – living proof our ancient musical history is still alive!

Check out Dom Flemons on his Youtube channel!

George Gilmore – Akron, Ohio

Check out Abby The Spoon Lady on her Youtube channel!

If you enjoyed reading this post, you might also be interested in learning more about the history of words like jaywalker, dude, or juke as in jukebox!

See the previous or next Fun Facts About English

Charts are an excellent reference that you can tack to a classroom board or directly in students’ interactive notebooks! Check out all the vocabulary charts available in Donald’s English Classroom!

Fun Facts About English #37 – Words That End in -gry

12/27/2019 by admin

Though hangry was included in the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) in the 1990s, only time will tell how long this relatively recent (1918) portmanteau will be with us. Surprising as it is that so few words end in -gry, equally interesting are some of the uncommon, archaic, and obsolete -gry words that have fallen out of use.

Going back to Old and Middle English, archaic variations and compounds using the words hungry and angry were numerous! Consider such colorful expressions as anhungry, unhungry, dog-hungry, meat-hungry, wind-hungry, ever-angry, fire-angry, half-angry, heat-angry, self-angry, and tear-angry.

As for uncommon words, let’s start with gry itself. This extremely rare word is defined as 1/10 of a line and was marked as obsolete in the 1934 Second New International Dictionary.

Other uncommon words include aggry, (a variegated glass bead found in Ghana and England), and meagry (a variation on the word meager). Foreign vocables turned into English-appearing words include the Hindi word puggry (a cloth wrapped around a sun helmet), or the Egyptian word iggry (a word that translates as, ‘Hurry up!’)

In researching this Fun Fact, I unwittingly smacked into a popular -gry riddle — just the kind to leave you feeling half-angry when you’re forced to say, “I giveth up.” You’ll find the answer at the end of this post. Good luck.

Riddle
Think of three words ending in -gry. Angry and hungry are two of them. There are only three words in the English language. What is the third word? The word is something that everyone uses every day. If you have listened carefully, I have already told you what it is. (Hint: the answer is NOT hangry.)

If you found this interesting to read, you might enjoy learning about the rules of stacked adjectives, why the word we is so unique among languages, or the history of counters like, “A murder of crows”!

See the previous or next Fun Facts About English

Stories for Young Readers, Book 1, is a graded textbook for students studying ESL/EFL. Dialogues for Young Speakers, Book 1, follows the Stories for Young Readers series with easy dialogues that will get students up and talking. Both of these textbooks are available as full textbook downloads.

Answer
With the question about -gry words being a kind of smokescreen, the rest of the riddle is interpreted to mean “What is the third word in the three-word phrase the English language?” The answer is “language” — something we use every day. Ugh, right!?

Fun Facts About English #36 – The Origins of Baseball

12/20/2019 by admin

Donald's English Classroom Fun Facts About English 36 Baseball

The full title of the British children’s book reads: A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, Intended for the Instruction and Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly With Two Letters from Jack the Giant Killer. Generally considered the first children’s book, it includes rhymes for each of the letters of the alphabet. The pocket-sized book was marketed with a ball for boys and a pincushion for girls. Popular in England, the book was re-published in Colonial America in 1762.

A Little Pretty Pocket-Book by John Newbery Kinney Brothers Publishing
Baseball Reference

The book was published with woodcuts of many period games, and included a rhyme entitled “Base-Ball.”

The Ball once struck off,
Away flies the Boy,
To the next destin’d Post,
And then Home with Joy.

Base-Ball A Little Pretty Pocket-Book by John Newbery Kinney Brothers Publishing Earliest Baseball Reference

Though this is the first known reference to “base-ball” in print, it was actually referring to “rounders,” a game played in England since the Tudor period. Rounders was described as “…a striking and fielding team game, which involves hitting a small hard leather-cased ball with a round wooden or metal bat and then running around four bases in order to score.”

In the book, Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game (2005), American baseball historian, David Block, argues that rounders and early base-ball were regional variants of each other and that the game’s most direct antecedents are the English games of “stool-ball” and “tut-ball.”

The game was brought by immigrants to North America where the modern version developed. By the late 19th century, baseball was widely recognized as the national sport of the United States. Today, baseball is also popular in parts of Central and South America, the Caribbean, and East Asia, particularly in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

You might also enjoy reading about the history of acronyms like SCOTUS, the origins of the word dude, or the shocking story of American spelling bees!

See the previous or next Fun Facts About English

Build a Four Seasons Tree Stand as useful classroom decoration or interactive notebook project with your students! ESL House and Community Places craft-activities are not only fun folding activities, they’re excellent 3D references in class! Wall maps offer a visual opportunity for language building exercises you’re sure to use year in and year out! Check out these and more fun activities in Donald’s English Classroom!

Fun Facts About English #35 – Words That Changed Meaning

12/13/2019 by admin

Kinney Brothers Publishing Fun Facts About English 35

The Old English word awe (ege) referred to fear, terror, or dread. Two derivative words, awful and awesome, both meant reverential wonder but evolved in completely opposite directions. Awful later took on a strictly negative connotation and, sometime in the mid-1900s, awesome came to mean extremely good.

Below are twelve more common words where meanings have evolved or changed over the centuries.

Audition

The Latin words audire and auditio(n) mean the ‘power of hearing or listening.’ In the 16th century, an audition was a medical term for unblocking a person’s hearing. In the 19th century, trying out for a play was called a ‘hearing’ where a playwright ‘listened’ to a person recite something. Writers began using audition as a fancier term for a ‘hearing’ and the word stuck.

Cheater

In the Middle Ages, upon the death of an owner of land without legal heirs, ownership lapsed to the Crown. This was known as the Crown’s right of escheats, from the Old French eschete and the Latin excidere, meaning to ‘fall away. ‘ The keepers of a king’s escheats were known as cheaters. Thieves swindling ignorant people with false Royal Seals led to a mistrust of the king’s cheaters and hence the current sense and use of the word.

Cute

Cute is a shortened version of the word acute. It originally meant sharp or quick witted, and was often written as ‘cute — with the apostrophe indicating the missing a. In the United States during the 1830s, cute came to mean attractive, pretty, or charming. Vestiges of its original meaning can still be heard in phrases like “Don’t get cute with me!” referring to a person trying to be smart or clever.

Egregious

The mid-16th century Latin word egregius meant “illustrious, select,” or “standing out (ex-) from the flock (greg-).” In short, egregious described something remarkably good! Possibly due to ironic use of the original meaning, the word has since taken the opposite tract with contemporary synonyms being “shocking, appalling, horrific, and terrible.”

Fathom

Fathom is defined as 1) a measure of 6 feet and used in determining the depth of water and 2) to consider after much thought. The first definition was originally the span of a man’s outstretched arms and varied between 5-5 ¹⁄₂ feet. To measure the depth of shallow waters, boatmen used a plumbed sounding line with fathom points. To fathom something figuratively, as in the second definition, means to ‘plumb the depths’ of an idea, where the result is sometimes unfathomable.

Fizzle

In the 16th century, fysel meant to “quietly break wind, or fart.” The contemporary word fizzle means 1) to make a hissing or sputtering sound, as in a gas forced out a narrow aperture and 2) to fail or die out, especially after a promising start. The second definition dates back to at least 1847 in American college slang as “a failure in an examination or a mumbled and stifled performance.”

Literally

Until recently, literally meant “in a literal manner or sense; exactly.” Literally is now often used for emphasis or to express strong feeling while not being completely true, e.g., “I was literally blown away by the movie.” Similarly used words would be real-ly, actual-ly, serious-ly, and total-ly. The egregious ‘misuse’ of this word is so totally widespread that the Oxford English Dictionary has literally added this as a definition. Seriously.

Meat

The Old English word mete referred to all food, even animal feed. When English moved into its Middle English era, it came to mean food from animal flesh. Meat in the figurative sense, as in “the meat of the matter,” or “a meaty novel,” appeared around the turn of the 20th century.

Myriad

In its Ancient Greece origins, the Late Latin word myriad meant 10,000. In Aegean numerals used during the Bronze Age, it was represented by a circle with five dashes. Today, myriad is a very great or uncountable number of things, as in “The myriad lights of the city.”

Naughty

Naught is defined as “zero, or nothing,” as in “All for naught.” In the 1300s, if someone called you naught-y, they were accusing you of being poor or needy. By the 1400s, naughty changed from “nothing” to “being bad or wicked.” Naughty could refer to a person who was behaving sexually provocative or, when applied to children, mischievous or disobedient. After six centuries, our current use of the word still refers to this sometimes stern, but more often playful childhood admonishment.

Spinster

During the late Middle Ages, a spinster was, by definition, a person who spun yarn or thread. This low-paying occupation was held almost wholly by unmarried women. Spinsters who married were in a social position to find higher status work and better pay. In legal documents where one’s occupation was used as identification (like Smith, Baker, Cook, and Hunter), spinster came to denote an unmarried woman. It also held the pejorative connotation of a woman’s undesirability in marriage, e.g., old age.

You might also be interested in proverbs that are often mistaken! Learn the history of the words rooster and jaywalker. Did you know everyday and every day have different meanings? Learn all about these topics and more on the Kinney Brothers Publishing blog!

See the previous or next Fun Facts About English

Check out the 68 Stories For Young Readers lesson packs from Kinney Brothers Publishing! The colorful series is also available as paperless lesson packs for the 21st-century classroom! Each lesson pack includes full lessons, audio, dialogues, and answer keys!

Using Maps in Class

12/11/2019 by admin

When I began learning Japanese in the early 80s, it was imperative that I learn how to ask for directions from the get-go – especially in Tokyo. Not only did I have to deal with my lacking sense of direction, I was also functionally illiterate as I didn’t know any Japanese when I first arrived. A guide book and a paper train map were always in my bag. I also remember the huge city map on the kitchen wall in the foreigner’s house where I lived; an invaluable reference for fresh-off-the-boat travelers like me. To whatever train station I might be going, I regularly stopped at the local police box to ask directions – even if I already knew where I was going. Why? It was excellent language practice and I milked it.

Looking back, I was lucky. I was in the real world, immersed in a new language, and learning daily. Because we teach in a box, we have to find inventive ways to bring meaningful, real-world language into the classroom. Maps offer a visual opportunity for building language skills.

In my own book publications, I created maps and activities that are included in the Phonics & Spelling series, Q&A worksheets, and referenced for nearly every story in the Stories For Young Readers textbooks. I wanted my kids to know where they are in the world, learn about someplace new, and not be afraid to ask for directions or offer help to someone in need.

Stories For Young Readers Lesson Packs Kinney Brothers Publishing

Consider all the language used when dealing with maps:

geographical vocabulary – rivers, lakes, mountains
community places, cities, capitals, countries
prepositions of place – in, on, in front of, behind
directionals – north, south, right, left, forward, back, around
ordinal numbers
grammar tenses – past, present, and future
map vocabulary – legends, icons, scales

Donald's English Classroom Community Places

Starting early…

As my kids get older and catch on to the fact that I don’t really swim from the U.S. to Japan every day, we start learning community places, easy country names, and playing games with flags. Flags are already familiar to many sports-minded kids and there’s no reason to be ignorant about your favorite team’s home turf. In preparation for the Jidou Eiken tests, community place names and geographic vocabulary are a regular part of my flashcard activities. Keep in mind, these kinds of exercises can be just as informative and entertaining in your adult ESL classes!

When students begin moving about in their community and become aware that some people come from other places, like me, we start working with maps. Map activities pull together a variety of language skills — language you’ve probably been teaching your kids since they were little! It begins with prepositions of place and sight words like at, in, on, next to, and in front of. Interrogatives like where, what, and how come early on when asking the most rudimentary questions.

Once students develop informational reading skills, we look at town maps and tackle exercises in asking for and giving directions. We start with simple commands like Turn right! Turn left! and Go straight! Similar to community flashcard exercises in the past, students express where they are or want to go on the maps, e.g., I want to go to the station, or I’m at the library. Especially with large classes, big wall maps are essential for leading students through these types of activities.

Map making…

I went out in search of maps for my classroom many times and in many places around Tokyo. I could never find what I was looking for! Available maps were the wrong language, too expensive, too complicated, too big, too small, and so on. Yes, I’m picky, and I’m not going to have something in my classroom simply for decoration. What I wanted were easy-to-read and colorful wall maps appropriate for upper-elementary ESL kids in English. Simple to find, right? Nope.

So, I started creating my own. Because I don’t have a poster-size printer, I resized digital images and created wall maps out of regular sheets of paper. The students and I glued them together as a class activity, and viola! I have wall maps of each continent, a town map for practicing directions, and a U.S. map so I can talk about where I came from. Each map is dedicated to the class that helped put it together with a picture of the students and the date.

Doald's English Classroom Map Instructions

I also wanted the maps to be an interactive resource in my lesson plans. So, along with the wall maps, I created charts, worksheets, plus blank and numbered maps for classroom activities and handouts for students’ interactive notebooks. These are items not normally sold with maps you buy at a bookstore. Importantly, all the student materials are congruent with the wall maps and I’m not hobbling together different resources to create a series of lessons.

I’m pleased to say, these maps are now available in my online store. Click on the images to learn more. I hope you find these maps useful in your own classes.

Map Worksheets Kinney Brothers Publishing

Playing with maps…

Here are some map activities I’ve found particularly useful in class. If you have some activities you especially enjoy, help a teacher out and let us know in the comments below!

Create your own town! With a blank town map and a list of community places, allow students to create their own towns! Then have students ask and give directions based on their created maps. Let students visit each other’s town or vote on their favorite town!
Give students a numbered or blank map. Beginning with a labeled place, like a station, dictate directions and have students label the place of arrival on their own maps. This works well as an assessment of lessons taught.
Ask students to imagine a country they’d like to travel to for vacation. Create an outline of topics you would like them to research: weather, geography, food, history, etc. This is great grammar practice for future conditionals. With the online tools available for research, the possibilities are endless!

Historical maps Kinney Brothers Publishing

For practice with past tense, display a historical map next to a current map. This activity gets your students really scanning a map closely to discover the differences.
Teachers who teach from their home country are more likely to have students from a variety of places. A map can be a wonderful springboard for enjoyable and informative language practice. Pin the countries where students are from or have traveled to on a world map. Students love to talk about what they know best: their home country and all its unique cultural differences!

Finally, if you’re teaching about the United States and want your students to know their state names, capitals, and regions, check out my post on U.S.A. Maps and download a free map puzzle!

I hope this post encourages you to consider using maps more often in your ESL lessons. I’ll finish with a favorite quote:

I was completely drawn to other lands. I discovered with time that it’s a thirst for other people, for otherness, for something fascinating and mysterious. Robert Lepage

As always, best of luck in your classes!
Donald Kinney