Valentine's Day: Playing With Language

Valentine’s Day is this Saturday, February 14. This holiday is celebrated romantically, and it's also a time for kids to celebrate their friendships. But I like it for the way Valentine cards play with the language, using puns and idioms to make jokes.

Even romantic-seeming phrases are acceptable for kids to give each other in friendship when using these kinds of jokes, such as a card with the phrase “Here is a flower for my Valentine: two-lips,” and a picture of a tulip. It is a joke about kissing, but only a joke. Depending on your child’s age and your own family’s culture, you may choose not to have your child give this sort of card, but there is no need to feel uncomfortable if they receive them.

Puns
Puns are jokes using homophones (words which sound alike but have different meanings) or near-homophones. (Knock-knock jokes use puns, too.) Puns are also a great test of English listening skills – the words look wrong when written, but make sense when spoken.

• Bee my Valentine!
• I love you bear-y much!
• You’re purr-fect!
• Tanks for being my Valentine!

Idioms
Idioms are phrases which use words to mean something other than their literal meaning. I use two books frequently when discussing idioms with ESL students: the Scholastic Dictionary of Idioms, which gives examples, definitions, and history in a kid-friendly format; and the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs, which is much more comprehensive, but also gives less explanation.

• Wear your heart on your sleeve.
• You’re the cat’s pajamas (or cat’s meow).
• I only have eyes for you.
• I’m head over heels for you.

Many American nicknames for people you love use food – honey, sweetie, sugar. Idioms are the same:

• You’re the apple of my eye.
• You’re the cream of the crop.
• I’m bananas (or nuts) for you.

“You can’t be beet” is both an idiom and a pun – a play on the homophones beat/beet, and a phrase which means something is the best. The illustration on a card will sometimes help explain the joke. This way of playing with language really helps with both English and cultural fluency. If you make a joke like this, you have really mastered the language!

Salted: The Globe Talks About Boston Slang

The Globe Sunday Magazine has a great article about local slang. "Salted" is a word that I'm too old to use, unless I wanted to make a teenager fall down from laughing at me. But there is a list of other local terms like jimmies and frappe, and an interesting discussion of how words can be a way to express the city's identity and history.

The writer uses a self-deprecating and sarcastic humor that can be difficult to notice if English is not your first language. Enjoy sentences like, "'[T]onic' is fading from use, thanks in part to the realization that it's actually the name for a completely different beverage."

Beantown And The Beanpot: Some Local Culture

Today and next Monday is the 58th annual Beanpot Hockey Tournament, among local colleges Boston College, Boston University, Harvard, and Northeastern. This 58-year tradition will be broadcast on NESN on TV, and by each of the four colleges' radio stations.

Boston is known as Beantown because baked beans was a commonly eaten dish in the past. This dish was common because it used molasses (a kind of sugar). Boston had plenty of molasses, unfortunately, because of the path of ships in the "triangle trade": slaves were brought from Africa to the Caribbean, molasses from the Caribbean to New England, and rum from New England to Africa.

The final chapter in Boston's beans-and-molasses history is both humorous and tragic. Molasses is a thick, sticky form of sugar which oozes so slowly that we sometimes describe things as being "as slow as molasses." It is hard to imagine not being able to simply walk faster than molasses would ever flow. When people hear the phrase "The Great Molasses Flood of 1919,"* they usually laugh, never imagining that it actually was a deadly event. But on January 15, 1919, a tank of more than 2 million gallons of molasses burst. The wave of molasses destroyed buildings and killed 21 people. My grandmother once told me that for many years after the event, downtown Boston would still smell like molasses on hot summer days.

Understandably, the smell and taste of molasses - and therefore baked beans - were unpopular in Boston for a long time after that. The companies which made baked beans either moved or closed. Ninety years later, Boston still doesn't eat many baked beans, but we use the nickname to express affection for our city.

*The Yankee magazine article available on this site may describe the tragedy too graphically for some children, but otherwise the site is an excellent source of information.

Update: Groundhog Day

I am sorry to report that Punxsutawney Phil predicted six more weeks of winter. However, the Pennsylvania groundhog does seem happy that the Pittsburgh Steelers won the Super Bowl last night.

Weekend Fun: Groundhog Day

February 2 is Groundhog Day. This is not a holiday, just a family-friendly fun way to break up the long, cold winter. According to legend, the groundhog comes out of his hole on this day to see if it is spring yet. If he sees his shadow, he will be frightened back into his hole, and we will have six more weeks of winter. If not, we can enjoy an early spring. The most famous groundhog prognosticator is Punxsutawney Phil, in Pennsylvania.

We have had so much snow this year that I hope Monday is cloudy and shadow-free.

Drumlin Farm in Lincoln is having a special Groundhog Celebration on Sunday from 9am-4pm. Activities include crafts, stories, science investigations, and hot cocoa drinking.