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Ampersand

09/01/2019 by admin

As part of my blogging activities, I publish a weekly Fun Facts About English series that offers tidbits of trivia about the English language. This has turned out to be quite a pleasurable indulgence in that I get to research somewhat obscure but fascinating facts. I set out with a goal of creating 50 facts for one year’s worth of posts. I’m about half-way through and feel a bit smarter for the effort.

In this post, I’m going to explain the simple factoid below.

Maybe it would be better to say, “the & glyph was per se the 27th character included with the alphabet.”

History

In Latin, the ampersand represents a cursive combination of the two letters E and T and is pronounced et, or and in English. Around the time when Old English was shedding its runic characters and adopting the Latin alphabet, the & ligature arrived as part of the orthographic package, and to this day continues to be used to represent the word and.

Why ampersand?

The ampersand was included in schoolbooks as the 27th letter of the English alphabet until the mid 19th century. It was understood not as a vowel or consonant, but as a useful symbol, added to the hind end of the alphabet, and simply known as and. Today, when we recite the ABCs, we often say “X, Y, and Z.” Two centuries ago, children’s chants included and (&) as the last letter. To say “X, Y, Z, and and” was a bit confusing, so the Latin phrase per se – meaning by or in itself – was inserted. In recitations, it sounded like this: X, Y, Z, and per se and (&). Eventually, and-per-se-and slurred into ampersand, a mondegreen that we use today.

By the late 1800s, the word ampersand also became a slang term for “rear end, posterior,” or “the buttocks.” Over time, the & glyph was de-classified within the alphabet, its usage decreased, and today is often frowned upon when used in modern writing.

And now you know.

As always, best of luck in your classes!

Donald Kinney
Kinney Brothers Publishing

Fun Facts About English #20 – Rhinorrhea

08/30/2019 by admin

Fun Facts About English 20 Kinney Brothers Publishing

To most laymen, medical terminology can be confusing when you’re not up to date on your Latin and Greek roots. Rhinorrhea is from the Greek words rhino– meaning “of the nose,” and –rhoia meaning “a flowing.”

Other common medical terms with rino- include:

Rinoplasty – nose surgery colloqually known as a ‘nose job.’
Rinolalia – or rinophonia, is a nasal quality of the voice, usually associated with disease or defect of the nasal passages.
Rinopharyngitis – inflammation of the mucous membrane of the nose and pharynx.
Gustatory Rhinitis – inflammation or runny nose that occurs because of spicy food.
Rhinologist – a physician who specializes in rhinology, or the nose.

Though you may not recognize these terms for common ailments, the next time you’re watching your favorite hospital drama, you can feel smug for being in the doctors’ circle of understanding.

Obdormition – This is when part of your body, like your arm, has “fallen asleep.” The prickly, tingling sensation is referred to as paresthesia.
Fasciculation – When muscle fibers spontaneously contract, they are commonly known as a “muscle twitch.” The Latin term means “little bundle.”
Transient Diaphragmatic Spasm – This is known as “getting the wind knocked out of you.”
Crepitus – This Latin term means “rattle” or “crack” and refers to the popping, creaking, and cracking of joints when you get out of bed in the morning. The word decrepit is of the same root.
Sphenopalatine Ganglioneuralgia – Whip this term out the next time you get a headache when eating ice cream! (click here for the pronunciation – it’s a mouthful!)

Believe it or not, healthcare professionals can have a sense of humor about medical terminologies and, in turn, do their best to explain a given condition to patients in the simplest terms. While some of the expressions below are inside jokes, most are simply trying to avoid unrecognizable titles or an explanation that includes “alphabet soup” – a reference to all the acronyms used in medical terminology.

Butts and Guts – This refers to a gastroenterologist, a doctor who specializes in ailments or afflictions that affect the stomach, intestines, colon, rectum, gallbladder, and esophagus.
Gas Passer – This is a humorous term for an anaesthesiologist because they often put their patients under with gas before an important or dangerous procedure.
Flu in the Knees – In the case of arthritis, the pain a patient may be feeling when doing certain activities may be more clearly understood where the condition can have flareups similar to a bad case of the flu.
Bloodsucker – This is medical slang for a phlebotomist, a health care professional that works with collecting a patient’s blood and properly storing it.
Code Brown – This is a good example of insider humor, as it refers to a patient who has had a poop incident and that it is everywhere.
Baby Catcher – Also known as an obstetrician, a baby catcher is a humorous title for a doctor who’s specialization is the practice of caring for pregnant women.

If you enjoyed this post, check out the common words eponymously named after colorful personalities! You may also be interested in the history of acronyms like SCOTUS and SNAFU, or why Pikes Peak is spelled without an apostrophe by law!

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Check out A Telling Story on Youtube for audio stories of classic children’s fairytales! Listen in class, on a long road trip with kids, or just to revisit your favorite childhood stories! These audio stories are also available as free downloads in Donald’s English ClassroomTo

Fun Facts About English #18 – The Day After Tomorrow

08/18/2019 by admin

Fun Facts About English 18 Kinney Brothers Publishing

From the Middle English word overmorwe, the influence of Norse languages can be seen when comparing the now obsolete overmorrow, or ‘day after tomorrow’, to the Dutch word overmorgen, Sweden’s overmorgon, and the German word ubermorgen.

English Timeline Kinney Brothers Publishing

In between the era of Old English and the Norman invasion in 1066, there was a period of Viking rule in England known as Danelaw. Though one may often think of the Vikings as ship-faring marauders, their governorship of the British Isles from the 9th to 11th centuries is far more nuanced. Their influence on the English language was so much that some scholars believe English should be reclassified as a Northern Germanic language (along with Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Swedish), rather than a West Germanic language (with Dutch and German). This is not only because the English language is so well peppered with Old Norse vocabulary, but the very grammatical structure of Old English itself underwent a drastic change during Danish rule. It’s speculated that about 5% of our contemporary language is owed to the Vikings. This influence may be most apparent in the Yorkshire dialect, which uses more Old Norse words in daily speech than standard English does.

The legacy of the Old Norse language is found in our days of the week, with the word Thursday (Þorsdagr), meaning “Thor’s day” after the Viking god. Although “Tuesday,” “Wednesday” and “Friday” are actually Anglo-Saxon equivalents of Norse Gods, their similarity points to the common ancestry shared by various German tribes in prehistoric northern Europe.

More vocabulary includes words of war and violence like berserk, club, and gun. The influence is evident in our social, cultural, and legal lexis as well, with words such as husband, law, thrift, and yule for the pagan holiday. Beasties of the fields and forests include bug, reindeer, and bull. Muck, mire, and dirt are so common in contemporary English, we’ve long forgotten we’re speaking in an Old Norse dialect.

Danelaw and the rule of the Vikings came to an end with the Norman invasion lead by William, the Duke of Normandy. As English moved into its Middle English period, many features of Old English, along with the influence of Old Norse vocabulary and grammar, became simplified or disappeared altogether.

If you’d like to read more about the rich history of the English language, check out my post, The History of English. You might also be interested in the cultural and linguistic influences of Greek, Spanish, and Native American dialects on the English language!

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Fun Facts About English #17 – Average Vocabulary Size

08/10/2019 by admin

Most experts believe that the English language has about one million words. Difficult to determine and not easy to agree on, the problem rests in defining what represents a discrete “word.” It’s important to remember that this number includes different forms of the same word, or lemmas, e.g., run, running, ran, plus archaic words not commonly used in modern English. The Oxford English Dictionary lists a mere 171,476 words that are in current use.

Besides word counting, for individuals there’s a distinction between receptive knowledge — referring to our passive vocabulary, and productive or active knowledge — words we use when speaking and writing. As a rule of thumb, our receptive vocabulary is at least twice the size of our productive vocabulary.

Studies show that the average native English speaker knows about 20,000 words with a university-educated person knowing around 40,000 words. When speaking and writing (emails, letters, notes, etc.) this goes down to about 5,000 very common words that are used repeatedly.

Building vocabulary skills is a priority for many native speakers and non-native learners of English alike. The benefits include social and professional mobility as well as cognitive improvement. If you teach English as a foreign language, or you’re looking to expand your horizons abroad, check out the article, How to Teach English to Kids, from IELTS Podcast, a company dedicated to helping ESL students improve their reading, writing, and speaking skills.

Try this Ghent University (Belgium) online to test to estimate your English vocabulary size. Good luck! If you enjoyed this post, you might also be interested in the history of American spelling bees, or how American and British English diverged over the centuries!

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Stories for Young Readers is a graded textbook series designed to extend students’ skills and interest in developing their ability to communicate in English. To learn more, visit Kinney Brothers Publishing or check out all the textbook downloads from Donald’s English Classroom.

Fun Facts About English #15 – Johnson’s Dictionary

07/26/2019 by admin

Fun Facts About English 15 Kinney Brothers Publishing

Published on April 15, 1755, and written by Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language is considered to be one of the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language. Dr. Johnson was a British poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, and editor. With only the help of a handful of clerks, Johnson’s Dictionary took seven years to complete.

In truth, Johnson’s was not the first English dictionary ever written. There were dozens, but the problems with these predecessors were many. They tended to be little more than badly organized and poorly researched glossaries of ‘hard words.’ Others were translations from Latin and French or obscure, specialized vocabulary lists. One example was Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall, published in 1604. It listed approximately 3000 ‘difficult’ words, defining each one with a simple and brief description. The greatest failing of these early dictionaries was that they offered little in the sense of the English language as it appeared in use.

Nonetheless, Dr. Johnson borrowed heavily from these forerunners and his dictionary was the first to comprehensively document the English lexicon. Johnson’s innovations included illustrations of the meanings of words by literary quotations. He also added notes on a word’s usage, rather than being merely descriptive.

In a contemporary sense, Johnson’s etymologies are considered poor and he offered almost no guide to pronunciation. The dictionary was also linguistically conservative, using traditional spellings such as publick rather than public, simpler spellings favored by Noah Webster 73 years later.

Johnson’s imposition of his own tastes and interests is evident in the 42,000-plus entries. His dislike of French, for example, led to familiar words like unique, champagne, and bourgeois being omitted, while those he did include were given a thorough berating. Ruse is defined as “a French word neither elegant nor necessary,” while finesse is dismissed as “an unnecessary word that is creeping into the language.”

Still, the dictionary was considered the best of its day. The two volumes with their scope and structure were carried forward in dictionaries that followed, including Noah Webster’s Webster’s Dictionary in 1828 and the Oxford English Dictionary later in the same century.

Johnson’s Dictionary has been available in replica editions for some years. The entire first Folio edition is available on the website, A Dictionary of the English Language, as an electronic scan. Just looking at a few pages makes you appreciate the enormity of the project and how valuable it has been as a historical record of the English language.

You might also be interested in reading about the history of the English language, why English has no official language academy or learn about the history of crossword puzzles!

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Preparing your classroom with inspiring and informative decorations that invite interaction is so important for students and teachers alike. Check out some of these ideas from Donald’s English Classroom if you’re getting ready for new classes or need a refresh midyear!

Fun Facts About English #14 – American Dialects

07/18/2019 by admin

Kinney Brothers Publishing Fun Facts About English 14

Historical and present linguistic evidence does not support the notion of there being one single “mainstream” American accent. The sound of American English continues to evolve, with some local accents disappearing, but several larger regional accents having emerged in the 20th century.

Social scientists estimate the number of U.S. dialects range from a basic three – New England, Southern, and Western/General America – to 24 or more. Some researchers suggest it’s impossible to count the number of dialects in the United States because, under a loose definition of the term, thousands of cities, towns, and groups have their own varieties or dialects.

Discrete boundaries between dialects are often difficult to determine since dialects share many features with one another. Speakers use different language forms – or identical forms in different ways – based not only on where they live but also on such factors as their social class, ethnicity, and gender.

Here are three myths about dialects.

MYTH: A dialect is something that SOMEONE ELSE speaks.
REALITY: Everyone who speaks a language speaks some dialect of the language; it is not possible to speak a language without speaking a dialect of the language.

MYTH: Dialects result from unsuccessful attempts to speak the “correct” form of a language.
REALITY: Dialect speakers acquire their language by adopting the speech features of those around them, not by failing in their attempts to adopt standard language features.

MYTH: Dialects inherently carry negative connotations.
REALITY: Dialects are not necessarily positively or negatively valued; their social values are derived strictly from the social position of their community of speakers.

Take pleasure in the differences and marvel at the varied influences that make American English so dynamic. Listen to the people at work, in your neighborhood, or in social groups. Do you, as a group, use unique words or have a distinctive manner of speaking? Do you individually use language that sets you apart from those around you? Is there a region of the U.S. where you feel ‘home’ in your language? As Americans become increasingly mobile, often moving to different parts of the country over a lifetime, we never stop participating in the ever-evolving language around us.

You might also be interested in reading about English as the official language in the sea and air, why the U.S.A. doesn’t have an official language, or learn more about the history of the English language!

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Check out all the full textbook downloads in Donald’s English Classroom. From pre-k through adult, Kinney Brothers Publishing has learning materials that will bring your English language classes to life!