Donald's English Classroom

Fun Facts About English #81 – Old English Words

10/29/2020 by admin

Kinney Brothers Publishing Flitterwochen

English Timeline Kinney Brothers Publishing

Old English is the language of the early Germanic inhabitants of England known as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. Their settlements began in the 5th century and lasted until the end of the 11th century. Only about a sixth of Anglo-Saxon words have survived and make up about 1% of the current English language. On the other hand, 80% of the thousand most common words in modern English come from Old English! They include the words water, earth, house, food, drink, sleep, sing, night, strong, the, a, be, of, he, she, you, no, and not. Interestingly, many common swear words are also of Anglo-Saxon origin, including tits, fart, shit, turd, arse, and probably, piss.

Here are ten Old English words you can start using to bring some medieval color to your daily vocabulary. You’ll also be doing your part to save endangered words!

anon – shortly; “The concert will begin anon! Make haste!”
bedward – to head to bed; “It’s late and I’m moving bedward!”
crapulous – feeling ill after too much eating or drinking; “I’m feeling totally crapulous today, dude.”
elflock – tangled hair; “After frolicking in the woods, her hair was full of elflocks.”
gardyloo – what you shout before emptying your bedpan out the window; “The drunk yelled, “Gardyloo!” and pissed out the window.”
groke – to stare intensely at someone who is eating hoping you will receive some, especially a cat or dog; “The dog sat groking at me while I ate my sandwich.”
grubble – to feel or grope around for something you can’t see; “She grubbled in the bottom of her purse for her house key.”
overmorrow – the day after tomorrow; “We’ll have to travel all day tomorrow and overmorrow to arrive by Sunday.”
trumpery – things that look good but are basically worthless; “The crowd was taken in by his Madison Avenue trumpery.”
twattling – gossip, nonsense; “The woman is nothing but a twattling old gossip!”

If you enjoyed this post, you might also be interested in French words that you should know when dining at French restaurants, the influence of Native American languages in American English, or common words you didn’t know were Spanish!

See the previous or next Fun Facts About English. https://kinneybrothers.com/blog/blog/2020/02/21/fun-facts-45-native-american-lanugage/

Visit Donald’s English Classroom for downloadable ESL games, flashcards, charts, full textbooks, and so much more!

Fun Facts About English #80 – Scientist

10/29/2020 by admin

The word science came into the English language via Old French from the Latin word scientia, meaning “knowledge, learning, application, and a corpus of human knowledge.” From ancient times, the pursuit of knowledge included things like grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Previous to the term scientist, a practitioner investigating nature and the physical universe was known as a natural philosopher.

Rev. Dr. William Whewell, who coined the word scientist in 1834, was a British polymath; scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science.

William Whewell Kinney Brothers Publishing

From ancient times, an insular focus on social and religious systems often made little distinction between knowledge of astronomy and math, for example, or other types of knowledge, like mythologies and legal systems. The fundamental break with religion and the onset of the first industrial revolution changed this in the 18th century, giving rise to empirical science and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. By the end of the 19th century, with the changes brought about by science, war, and a second industrial revolution, we found ourselves in vastly different, faster-paced lifestyles unlike anything previously known.

Thomas Arnold Kinney Brothers Publishing

Labor, transportation, and communication saw an upheaval in social orders and means that had been in place for centuries. Landscapes and seascapes changed with the introduction of the locomotive, the telegraph, iron-clad ships, and electric lights. Factories tooled and expanded their production lines, becoming faster, and more efficient. The business of business became a science in itself with economies of manufacturing and the cost-effectiveness of human labor as its focus. By the early 20th century, in a period of just ten years, the horse, that stalwart of transport and labor for millennia, was completely replaced by combustion engines.

While the big machines get the most attention, the 19th century also gave us myriad small inventions that were quickly adopted as household and work conveniences. Factories brought us cheaper textiles and ready-made clothing, safety pins, canned food, staplers, raincoats, ice boxes, matches, barbed wire, typewriters, sewing machines, toy balloons, toilet paper, wrenches, cylinder locks, and the zipper.

World Industrial Exhibition Ticket Kinney Brothers Publishing

With the specificity of scientific inquiry came new language and terminologies. Appendicitis, conjunctivitis, bronchitis, and colitis were all 19th-century coinages. Specialized areas of study gave us new fields such as biology, climatology, and ethnology.

Along with 19th-century engineering feats that included the Brooklyn Bridge and the Thames Tunnel, the first trans-Atlantic cable was laid in 1858, and pleasantries were telegraphically exchanged between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan. The cable was celebrated with souvenir watch fobs, earrings, pendants, letter openers, candlesticks, and walking-stick toppers. By 1880, the simple word hello, previously nothing more than a coarse expression for calling hounds to a chase, became a salutation for “calling” someone on the newly invented telephone.

Brooklyn Bridge Kinney Brothers Publishing

With its break from religious ties, scientists and inventors advanced civilization at such a pace, it truly must have seemed like “three hundred years in the span of thirty.” The next century literally took us to the moon and now a robotic vehicle is sending us data from Mars. Telescopic satellites photograph distant galaxies and star factories, relaying images that are nothing short of breathtaking. Today, 750,000 miles of submarine cables and satellites allow us to communicate, collaborate, and trade on the internet globally. Robots and AI are redefining manufacturing, the efficacy of human labor, and our “relationship” to work. Moore’s Law tells us our world is going to change at a pace and scale even twentieth-century industrialists could hardly have imagined. Buckle up!

To glimpse what’s in store for humanity in the next few decades, take a look at Tony Seba’s RethinkX, a technology think tank that is making data-based predictions for transportation, food industries, and the race toward renewable energies.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like reading about words that are understood all over the world, how the use of acronyms exploded in the past two centuries, or how rebracketing changes the pronunciation of common words!

Go to the previous or next Fun Facts About English.

Kinney Brothers Publishing’s Communication Series is a graded textbook series for students studying ESL/EFL. Stories for Young Readers and Dialogues for Young Speakers offer readings, exercises, puzzles, and easy dialogues that will get students up and talking. This series is available as printed textbooks, downloadable pdf files, and as digital content on Google Slides – perfect for your online classes!

Fun Facts About English #78 – Spelling Laws

10/24/2020 by admin

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN) is a Federal body established to maintain uniform geographic name usage throughout the Federal Government. The BGN comprises representatives of Federal agencies concerned with geographic information, population, ecology, and management of public lands.

The BGN focuses on the names of natural features, as well as canals, channels, and reservoirs. The BGN does not rule on the names of cultural or man-made features such as roads, streets, shopping centers, churches, schools, hospitals, or airports – unless specifically asked.

The U.S. is the only country with a policy of eradicating apostrophes thanks to President Benjamin Harrison who set up the BGN in 1890. The BGN’s archives contain no indication of the reason for this policy.

The board’s current “Principles, Policies and Procedures” manual states, “The word or words that form a geographic name change their connotative function and together become a single denotative unit. They change from words having a specific dictionary meaning to fixed labels used to refer to geographic entities. The need to imply possession or association no longer exists.”

In their 113-year history of promulgating names, they have eradicated approximately 250,000 apostrophes. So, Henry’s Fork became Henrys Fork, Pike’s Peak became Pikes Peak, and King’s Mills became Kings Mills.

The government agency has granted only five exceptions, mostly under public pressure. Those allowed use of an apostrophe are:

Martha’s Vineyard, MA
Ike’s Point, NJ
John E’s Pond, RI
Carlos Elmer’s Joshua View, AZ
Clark’s Mountain, OR

If you enjoyed this post, learn the reason the U.S. doesn’t have an official language, why the English language has no language academy, or how English became the official language of the air and sea!

Go to the previous or next Fun Facts About English.

Visit Donald’s English Classroom for downloadable ESL games, flashcards, charts, full textbooks, and so much more!

Fun Facts About English #79 – The Letter Z

10/24/2020 by admin

In most English-speaking countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Zambia, and Australia, the name of the letter Z is zed, pronounced /zɛd/. Zed takes its name via French and Latin from the Greek equivalent, zeta. In American English, its name is zee /ziː/. Zee is thought to have originated from a late 17th-century British dialect and influenced by the bee, cee, dee, ee pattern of much of the alphabet.

This British dialectical form was likely what the English Puritan minister and author, Thomas Lye [Leigh, Lee], was drawing from when he published his New Spelling Book in England in 1677; the full title of which is:

A New Spelling Book, Or, Reading and Spelling English Made Easie: Wherein All the Words of Our English Bible are Set Down in an Alphabetical Order and Divided Into Their Distinct Syllabls

At the time of its publishing, Britain was home to a variety of dialectical pronunciations of the letter Z that included zed, zod, zad, zard, ezod, izzard, and uzzard. Samuel Johnson, in his highly influential Dictionary of the English Language published in London in 1755, referenced izzard as the name of the letter. In King Lear, 150 years earlier, Shakespeare had used zed.

Beginning in the 1600s, zee and other British pronunciations made the voyage across the Atlantic to colonial America. By 1883, British historian, Edward Augustus Freeman, noted that zee was mainly found in (formerly Puritan) New England, while zed was the accepted form in the American South. Areas such as Philadelphia vacillated between the two. He also noted that not a few Americans still used izzard, a fact that tickled his British funny bone.

Nonetheless, by the 19th century, zee became firmly established in the U.S. with several important developments. New England born, Noah Webster, published his own American Spelling Book in 1794 with the letter “ze.” In 1828, Webster also published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language asserting the pronunciation of the letter Z as “zee.” Finally, “The Alphabet Song,” copyrighted in 1835 and published by Boston-based music publisher, Charles Bradlee, rhymed Z with “me.”

FYI: The tune of “The Alphabet Song” is based on the 18th-century French song “Ah, vous dirai-je, maman” and popularized by Mozart. The melody is also used in other children’s songs such as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.”

It’s worth noting that, like zee, Webster also defined the standards of American spelling for words like theater for theatre and honor for honour,” spellings that were not invented by Webster himself. These were spelling variants in use in the English language, including in Britain. Webster simply chose to institute one variation as a standard.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Britain was undergoing a similar change, namely a push-back against izzard and its variants. Sticking with the etymological legacy of its French origins (zéde), zed became enshrined as the proper name of the letter in British English.

Finally, it’s important to remember, unlike most major languages in the world, English has never had a regulatory body that governed its use – anywhere nor at any time. As for slinging tired arrows at the U.S. for its “unilateral” divergence from British English, let’s reflect on the idea that even today, in a country the size of Louisiana, England has over 40 dialects (compared to 24 in the whole U.S.) and a long legacy of myriad spelling and pronunciation variations. Over several centuries and 4000 miles apart, the notion of a culturally freeze-dried, correct language and orthography simply didn’t exist, on either side of the pond.

You might also be interested to learn why North Americans pronounce R differently than the British, why rooster is the preferred euphemism in American English, or why English has no language academy!

Go to the previous or next Fun Facts About English.

I Have/Who Has are excellent exercises in reading, speaking, and listening! Click here to see how you can make this simple activity walk across the room! Check out all the I Have/Who Has activity sets in Donald’s English Classroom.

Fun Facts About English #76 – The Longest Isogram

10/23/2020 by admin

Kinney Brothers Publishing uncopyrightable

OK, word nerds, this post is for you!

An isogram, also known as a nonpattern word, is a word with no repeating letters or, more broadly, a word in which the letters occur an equal number of times. This category of words can be further subdivided into first, second and third orders, words with repeating pairs, words that can be transposed, words equally divided between the first and second half of the alphabet and… well, you get the picture.

In addition to being an isogram, the meaning of uncopyrightable is ambiguous. It could mean “able of being un-copyrighted” or “unable of being copyrighted.”

Because of the paucity of 15-letter non-pattern words, attempts have been made to add to their numbers by “coining” more of them. They include misconjugatedly, hydroneumatics, and prediscountably. Possible 16-letter words are uncopyrightables and subendolymphatic.

twelve-letter isograms Kinney Brothers Publishing

Isogrammatic Orders

First-order isograms, like uncopyrightable, are words where each letter appears only once. 14-letter isograms include ambidextrously, troublemaking, and demographics.

Second-order isograms, where each letter appears twice, are Vivienne, Caucasus, couscous, intestines, and deed.

Third-order isograms, where every letter appears three times, are deeded, sestettes (a spelling variant of sextets), and geggee (a victim of a hoax).

The longest first-order isogrammatic place name, at 14 letters, is Bricklehampton, a small village in Worcestershire, England.

eleven-letter isograms Kinney Brothers Publishing

If you’re interested in more word oddities and trivia, get your favorite beverage and check out this site by Jeff Miller (who also has a pretty mean collection of dictionaries!) Peruse this compendium of online resources for wordplay, puzzlers, making word clouds, and saving endangered words.https://kinneybrothers.com/blog/blog/2020/12/22/fun-facts-89-collective-nouns/

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like to know the word with the most consecutive vowels, what makes a word autological, or where collective nouns like, “A murder of crows” come from!

Go to the previous or next Fun Facts About English.

Trends: Business and Culture Reports, Books 1 & 2, bring you sixty topical Business Reports that will entertain, inform, and prompt your adult intermediate and advanced students toward lively discussions. Utilizing charts, graphs, puzzles, surveys, discussion activities, and more, these Business Reports invite students to explore and compare cultural, business, and language matters.

Blank Board Games

10/20/2020 by admin

Swimming with Sharks Kinney Brothers Publishing

Growing up in a family with six siblings, there was no end of board games to play. I remember playing Candy Land and learning colors. Checkers and chess taught me strategy. Monopoly presented a world of real estate, property taxes, and banking. The Game of Life taught me about life insurance and the cost of living. There was Scrabble, backgammon, and tons of card games. Negotiating the rules, playing fair, and of course, arguing, were all important elements of the learning process. There were also important life lessons in all these games: playing a game is an exercise in cooperation, taking risks can be thrilling and advantageous, and when supportive, competition can push you to be better.

Fast-forward twenty years, and I found myself making board games for my ESL classes. When I was building the textbook, Phonics & Spelling, Book 2, interactive games and puzzles were important and I included many, as well as a game on the back cover! On one page, I constructed a simple CVC game board that I decorated with shark clip art and titled Swimming with Sharks! Like every page in the book, I tested the game in class many times. Of all that I created, none of the board games excited my kids like the threat of being eaten by a shark.

Click on the image to see larger.

Phonics and Spelling Book 2 Kinney Brothers Publishing

Swimming with Sharks! is very simple. Players take turns rolling dice, moving their counters around the board, and saying the word they land on out loud. The goal is to be the first to reach the “Safe” ship. If they land on “net,” they can cross over to the next space. Landing on “red,” means returning to the previous “red,” or “Start.” If players land on the “shark’s nose” toward the end of the board, they have to go all the way back to “Start.”

So popular was this board game, my brother, Michael, urged me to create a blank board so that different vocabulary could be inserted in place of the CVC words.

Michael explained in his blog post how he used the blank version of the board for dialogue drills, such as What’s your name? How old are you? Where do you live? Do you like…? Do you have…? What’s this? and What’s that?

“To practice simple dialogues, I use a separate Swimming with Sharks! game board that has blank spaces instead of words. When students land on a blank space, they must ask another player a question. If the student cannot think of a question to ask, they must go back the same number rolled on the dice. Likewise, if the student who is asked cannot answer the question, they must move their counter back that many places on the board. The same rules apply for landing on “net,” the color “red,” and “shark’s nose” as the original game in Phonics & Spelling, Book 2.”

The blank version of Swimming with Sharks! can be used with any set of vocabulary, Q&A, or dialogues you want your students to practice. I always have several laminated boards in my desk ready at a moment’s notice. You can download the blank game board here. It’s on us! Enjoy!

Board games to get your kids talking!

Blank Game Boards Bundle Donald's English Classroom

If you like to play board games in class, take a look at this Blank Game Board Bundle from Donald’s English Classroom. These blank boards offer teachers the flexibility of creating their own games. For preschool through adult language learners, board games give students repetitive practice in a format that makes learning fun!

As always, best of luck in your classes!

Donald Kinney
Kinney Brothers Publishing