Here we can discuss some unusual words, things and ideas!

 

Do you like to prepare some delicious food? Look at this recipe

 

Recipe: how to prepare a tasty piece of writing
 
Published in English Teaching Forum, Vol. 32 (2), 1994: 13
 
Ingredients
 
- A lot of ideas to be expressed in writing
- Relevant vocabulary items
- A great amount of motivation
- Some connectors
- Linguistic proficiency (syntax, grammar, etc)
- Knowledge of rhetorics (organisation, stylistic devices, coherence, etc)
- A stimulating topic
- Purpose of writing
- Awareness of the audience.
 
Utensils
 
- Two or three blank sheets of paper
- A pen/pencil/micro-processor
- A dictionary/thesaurus (for voc. error-prone)
- Something to write on
- A PC (optional)
 
Procedure
 
- Leaven your ideas until they rise
- Shape them
- Mix them on a sheet of paper without worrying about taste
- Taste your mixture for meaning first and then for accuracy
- Then chop some of your mixture into clear and expressive small pieces
- Then add the required pinch of connectors where/if necessary
- After that slice the mixture into paragraphs; don't worry if some slices
are bigger than others
- And then sprinkle some punctuation symbols where needed (according to
taste)
- Finally, if the piece is tasty enough, put it down on a clean sheet of
paper and serve it to be appreciated.
- Don't forget to decorate it by leaving a margin and writing on every other
line
 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now give some food for thought OK?

 

1.    Can you arrange the digits 1 to 7 to total to 100 ?

2.    What is dactylography ?

3.    What is natation?

4.    What is acrostic?

5.    What is limerick?

6.    Who is a laconic?

7.    What is brontophobia?

8.    What is pangram? Give an example.

9.    What is Bt cotton?

10.    What is halyard?

Now look for the correct answers and try to rate yourself!!

 

Answers

 

1. 2+15+36+47

2.    Study of fingerprints

3.    Swimming (from Latin)

4.    Word formed by the first letter of each line of a poem.

5.    It is a nonsense verse of five lines. It is also an Irish town.

6.    A person who speaks very few words.

7.    Fear of thunder thunderstorms.

8.    A sentence which contains all the letters of the alphabet

        e.g. the quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.

        e.g. pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.

9.    Bacillus thuringiensis cotton.

10.    The rope used for hoisting and lowering a flag.

 

( For each right answer give 4 scores and for wrong answer -2 ok?

   Now , if your score is 40 ,"Excellent". You are a genius !!

             if your score is 20 - 38,Good .Try to improve

             below 20 ? Read Read ......       )       

 

 

One sure way to gain immortality is to do something so memorable that your name ends up in the dictionary, as in the following examples.

 

1.       Mesmerize - To hypnotize.       after FA.Mesmer  Austrian physician.

2.       Galvanize -  To stimulate, startle or incite.  after Luigi Galvani.

3.       Herculian -   With the strength of Hercules. Son of Jupiter  in greek

                               myth.

4.       Bowdlerize - To remove offensive portions from a book.        After

                                 T Bowdler who censored the plays of Shakespeare.

5.       Braille - System of representing letters raised by dots .

                          after Luis Braille, blind French man.

6.       Ampere - A unit of measuring electric current.     After AM Ampere

                           French Physcist.

7.       Hector - To threaten       after Hector, son of Priam, a hero of Trojan

                                                                                                             war.

8.       Baedeker – A guide book         after Karl Baedeker German publisher.

 

( Find the Origin …….  Spoonerism, watt, boycott,burke,hooligan,scrimshaw,davy,fudge,pinchbeck)

 

FIGURES OF SPEECH

 

How  knowledgeable are you about the technical term used to describe figures of speech? Identify them by the definitions and examples listed below.

 

1.            A likening of one thing to another .                                  : Your voice is like a fog horn.

2.            The replacing of one thing by another which

                resembles it in some way.                                              : All the world is a stage.

3.            The giving of life to lifeless objects.                                : Laughter holding both his sides.

4.            The placing of words in contrast to one another.          : To err is human;but to forgive is divine.

5.            A statement which outwardly seems a contradiction

               in terms                                                                              : Sentenced to a living death.

      

 

        e-mail me if u want to get the answer!!

 

1