Word of the Week
01 September 2010
When you look up the meaning of a verb (action word) in the dictionary you may have trouble finding it. This is because most dictionaries list verbs as infinitives. That is, you will find the word incubate easily in a dictionary, but you may not find incubates, incubated or incubating. The infinitive is the basic form of the verb, and in English it usually has the word to in front of it (eg to ask, to see,etc). The infinitive doesn't give any idea of which person is involved, or how many people or things, or any notion of time (past present or future). In French infinitives don't have a word in front of them - avoir (to have), etre (to be), etc. You remember your French verbs in this form.
Some people think that (in English) it is a great crime to put a word or words between 'to' and the verb, eg 'to completely understand.' This is called 'splitting the infinitive.' Probably the most famous example of this is from the start of each episode of Star Trek: 'to boldy go where no man has gone before.'
One or two famous writers have taken exception to having their split infinitives corrected. The brilliant crime writer Raymond Chandler (get one of his books and read it), once wrote to his publisher:
"When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split so it will stay split."
01 June 2010
Obscurity: The state of not being known about; uncertainty; not important or well known; of not being easily understood, hard to make out.
"Obscurity" comes from the Latin "obscurus" meaning "dark."
Darkness. If you look for words for "darkness" across Europe you will find "oscuridad" in Spanish and "obscurite´" in French. German comes closer to our word "darkness" in "dunkelheit."
Darkness. As we move closer to the longest day and evenings stretch out towards 10pm we are on the other side of the year from the winter solstice, about which John Donne wrote: "It is the year's midnight, and it is the day's."
Darkness. I remember walking along a factory corridor when the lights went out. There were no windows - just complete darkness. I have never been more scared. Maybe this was because I have lived most of my life in cities where there is not much real darkness, always that orange glow of the street-lights. There was a street-light attached to the wall outside my bedroom window in the house where I grew up. Almost enough to read by.
Darkness. On a night walk you hear everything.
Darkness. The power cuts of the 70s: old white candles brought out from under the sink. No TV, and all of us round the table looking at each other in the little light.
And John Milton's great oxymoron from the poem Paradise Lost: "darkness visible." Can darkness be visible? Of course it can.
29 April 2010
At this time of examinations, I thought this word may be useful. A mnemonic (pronounced ni-mon-ic), is a pattern of letters or words used to help you remember something. It often involves a rhyme of some kind: we all remember "Never eat shredded wheat" for the points of a compass (north, east, south, west). This is one that everyone knows, but you can make ones up for yourself, perhaps involving the names of family, or friends. For example, the Malay word for friend is "kawan"; if you have a friend called Cowan you could remember the Malay word by associating the two.
Little rhymes help. What if you were trying to remember some Russian vocabulary? The Russian word for knife is "nozh." What about this? "Eat your nosh (food) with a knife." The Russian word for brother is "brat." I am guessing, but I think we could all remember "my brat of a brother"! Longer patterns can also be used: "So bark a number of dogs" for "sobaka" which is Russian for "dog."
I don't have a great memory, and am always jealous of those who can recite long poems, or speeches from Shakespeare. I have never been able to do it. Even my favourite speeches from Shakespeare fade. That one from King Lear when he is out in the storm - "Poor naked wretches, wheresoever thou are, that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm...I have taken too little care of this...Take Physic Pomp...distribution should undo excess, and each man have enough." Great words, but I would have to look up the rest.
Never mind. Here are my revision tips, for what they are worth.
Try to condense your notes so that you are left looking at fewer pieces of paper the closer you get to the exam.
Mind maps. Mind maps. Mind maps.
When on study leave make sensible use of your time: up reasonably early; get some fresh air (walk, jog, offer to go for pint of milk); be at your desk before 10am; work in sessions. Do something completely different at some point in the day: read a book, play football, play the guitar, ride your horse, or (if you must!) have a game or two of FIFA 10.
Good luck!
(Thanks to the late Anthony Burgess for some of the language examples).
31 March 2010
The Christian Paschal festival took its name from the Hebrew word "Pesach", meaning "Passover". Our word "Easter" comes from the Old English word "eastre" which was a pagan festival held at this time of year in honour of the goddess of dawn. When Christianity came to this part of the world, it was natural for the two festivals (both happening at roughly the same time), to be joined. Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the full moon that occurs from March 21st onwards. Easter Sunday cannot be earlier than March 22nd, or later than April 25th.
There is an old story that the sun danced on Easter Day. It is mentioned in a poem about a bride by Sir John Suckling:
"But oh, she dances such a way
No sun upon an Easter day
Is half so fine a sight."
This reminds me of the old country legend that farm animals used to bow down on their knees at midnight on Christmas Eve. It is the subject of a great poem by Thomas Hardy which ends:
"I should go with him in the gloom
Hoping it might be so."
Happy holiday!
23 March 2010
I have lived long enough now to be able to look back over the world events of my lifetime, and wonder which will turn out to be truly significant. I watched Neil Armstrong step onto the surface of the moon . (I remember sitting in front of a small black and white TV with my American neighbours - their mother made apple pie; my mother made apple crumble). Later, the Iron Curtain came down with the Wall in Berlin. Closer to the present was the attack on the Twin Towers in New York.
I often wonder at the changes that happened in the vast country I grew up to know as the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a mystery to us, and its death possibly makes it more mysterious for us now. The arrival of a new leader in Mikhail Gorbachov marked the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union, and he introduced two Russian words into the English language. The first "Glasnost" has, for us, the meaning of public openness, of accountability, of a softening of ideological rigidity. However, in Russian the word derives from "glas" meaning "voice", and "glasit" meaning "say" or "read." In Russian then, "glasnost" means no more than "publicity". The other word was "Perestroika" which means "reorganisation" or "reconstruction." There is no hint in the word of what kind of reconstruction was implied - no hint of an abandonment of a whole system. Perhaps, in the West, we read more into the words "glasnost" and "perestroika" than was ever there...
