English On The Radio

There are several excellent shows and segments on public radio which involve the English language. Some involve pretty advanced vocabulary, but they are enjoyable even if you don't know all the words - even the experts who are featured on the shows don't know it all!

WGBH airs Says You! on Sunday at 11am and Saturday at 8pm. It will tape an episode this summer in nearby Camden, Maine. WGBH also airs The Writer's Almanac weekday mornings at 8:55am. This short segment includes some literary history and a poem reading.

WBUR airs repeats of My Word Sunday at 10:30pm. This show was recorded by the BBC from 1956-1990. The British accents add an extra level of difficulty, but it is silly and reassuring to see experts making mistakes about English. too.

Weekend Edition Sunday (WGBH at 7 and 8am, WBUR at 8am) has a puzzle segment with Will Shortz, editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle.

Weekend Fun: Magic Tree House Author

Mary Pope Osborne, author of the Magic Tree House books will give a presentation, at 2pm at the Wellesley Middle School (map). After the presentation, Ms. Osborne will also sign books.

This event is sponsored by Wellesley Booksmith, an excellent local bookstore (its sister store, Brookline Booksmith, is also great). The store expects a big turnout, so read their information about when the doors will open, getting in line for autographs, and how many books the author will sign.

The books' vocabulary and grammar are both pretty basic, making them accessible to English learners. They can really help kids who are having trouble following social studies or science classes. If your child's class will soon be studying ancient Egypt, for example, have him or her read Mummies in the Morning a week or two before they start the unit at school. Students can read them at their own pace and get a head start on the special vocabulary for each subject. Many books also have non-fiction research guides (such as the Mummies & Pyramids partner to Mummies in the Morning), which can be a good second step if your child wants even more information about the subject.

Magic Tree House: The Musical will be in Boston February 21-28. The 40th MTH book, Eve of the Emperor Penguin, was published last September

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."

Poem: The Raven

On January 29, 1845, Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven" was first published in the New York Evening Mirror. Try reading it out loud - or watch actor Vincent Price - to hear the creepy, scary rhythms.

Poetry is a good way to practice pronunciation (if the poem rhymes) and the rhythm of the spoken language.

And now for something completely different...

Etc.

English language learners are sometimes confused by the abbreviation "etc." This is actually the Latin phrase et cetera (et = and; cetera = the rest). It means "and other things like that." Even though it is almost always written as an abbreviation, it is pronounced in full: /et 'set er a/
Imagine you have an incomplete list:

apples, bananas, grapes, etc.

That ending tells you that there are other things on the list which aren't written down, and you can read it: "apples, bananas, grapes, and other things like that." What could etc. mean here? Because the listed things are all kinds of fruit, it could mean oranges, peaches, or pears. It could not mean pizza, computers, or horses.

&

The Latin et also gave us the shape of the ampersand, which means "and." Although the ampersand often looks like this:

&

a few fonts make it easier to see the Et letters (here in Trebuchet):

&

Cool, huh?

(This post's title is taken from the name of a Monty Python movie. The Monty Python TV show and movies were from England, so both the accents and the cultural jokes may sometimes seem hard to understand. However, the silliness of their skits is easy to understand without a word of English!)

Happy Birthday, Robot!

English doesn't have many words from the Czech language. Today is a chance to celebrate an important one.

On January 25, 1921, Rossum's Universal Robots, a play by Karel Capek, premiered in Prague. Although the play is now mostly forgotten, it brought the word "robot" into the English language when the play premiered in New York in 1922 and published in an English translation in 1923. Capek's brother Josef Capek actually coined the term. He drew it from the Czech "roboti," meaning "labor."

The word "automaton" (plural: automata) has been used for centuries to describe machines built to move like living beings. These were generally designed for entertainment.

Word of the Week: Inaugurate

There were two inaugurations yesterday: President Barack Obama, and with much less fanfare, Beanpot Polyglot. The word inaugurate has the kind of strange history that makes English fun to study, so it's a good way to begin BPPG.

Can you believe that "inaugurate" probably comes from the Latin word for bird? In ancient Rome, an augur was someone who predicted the future by reading the entrails or (less messily) the flight patterns of birds [avis = bird; gerere = do, perform]. The augurs would predict the future before someone was took office. Over time, the action of office-taking became the verb inaugurare.

Today the word has lost all of its meanings of birds and predictions, keeping only the idea of a formal celebration of a new beginning, especially the beginning of a new office.