September 2010
22 September 2010
Metamorphosis means change: a complete change of form or appearance; a complete change of character. In science, it refers to a rapid change: the change from a chrysallis to a butterfly.
The word itself comes from Ancient Greece - "morphe" meaning "form." Maybe some people remember the cartoon character "Morph" who was (I think) a lump of Plasticene! Morph changed his form a lot!
Metamorphosis was, of course, the title of a great story by Franz Kafka in which a man wakes up one day to discover that he has changed into a giant beetle!
In school this month we had a short story competition for S1 pupils which was on the topic of "change." Many entries attempted to take well-known stories and then change them in some significant way. There were some great entries - winners published soon in the Knox News and on the website.
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."