What do you do?
That used to be an easy question: a simple icebreaker when meeting new people. Now though, it’s more complicated.
First of all, since the economic crisis, people are understandably wary about asking the question, as we’re more aware of the fact that the answer might be nothing.
Second, for a lot of people who do have something that they do, it can be a hard to specify exactly what it is.
Ok, I told you yesterday that there was one more use of commas I’d save till today. Have a look at the sentences below, and tell me which of the two people quoted has only one brother:
My brother who works in the bank visited today.
My brother, who works in the bank, visited today.
If you said the second person only has one brother, you’re correct! But how did you know?
This is something lots of people wonder. This is something I wonder sometimes, because commas can be quite complicated, and the rules about using them very specific. So if you’re not too concerned about how to use them, let me just say this:
If you use them in writing where you’d pause when speaking, you’ll probably be fine. In a very basic way, they provide a pause for a reader, just as we give ourselves regular pauses when we speak.
But if you want to know a little more, read on…
What makes something funny? Feel free not to even try to answer that, because obviously humour, like an earthworm in a snowstorm, is hard to pin down. Some suggest it’s based on minor transgressions, the release of tension, or shedding new light on things we take for granted. Of course, all of this depends on context and a wide number of variables, and is still going to be subjective even then. If we look at which individual words we tend to find funny though, there aren’t so many variables to consider, and we might be able to find out why they’re funny.
I’m thinking about this because researchers at the University of Warwick conducted a study of what the funniest words in the English language are. They did this by choosing a random sample of 5,000 words, and the asking 800 people to rate them for humour from 1 (unfunny) to 5 (hilarious). Here’s what they came up with, starting with the funniest:
It’s easy to say that Donald Trump has poor English. It’s easy to say that the level of English that he uses, in terms accuracy and tone, is far below the minimum expected of any public speaker. And of course the reason it’s so easy to say these things is that Donald Trump actually has really bad English. So inspired by a colleague’s idea, I’m going to test him, to see exactly what level of English he has. Specifically, I’m going to assess Trump’s spoken English using the assessment criteria of the spoken section of the IELTS exam.
Isn’t that just the classic signifier or a stupid, or at least uneducated, person? How could they possibly confuse these two antonyms? And of course this mistake is especially ironic as it’s related to education and learning. However, if you’re the type of person who likes to make themselves feel smarter by noting how people make this mistake but you don’t, perhaps you need to rethink how wrong these people actually are.
It was a lovely sunny evening in the west of Ireland today, which made me feel like Abbey Road would be a good accompaniment to my walk home. Probably because it features “Here Comes the Sun,” but I think it’s a generally positive album anyway, suitable for a balmy evening. As I was listening, I was struck by a line in “She Came in through the Bathroom Window” which I’d heard many times before, but never really thought much about:
She could steal, but she could not rob.
It’s a clever, cute line, and if you’re interested in the possible meaning behind it, you can look here. This evening though, it made me think about the difference between those two verbs: steal and rob.
English-Language Thoughts 