English language

Trust Me, I’m a Doctor

Niall O'Donnell 9 Comments

—Is there a doctor on the plane!?

—Yes, I’m a doctor!

—Oh thank God, come quick, I think he’s having a heart attack!

—Oh, I’m not a medical doctor. I have a PhD in medieval French literature. It’s quite interesting actually. You see…

Why do we use doctor in two such different ways in English? What’s the link between a physician and a top-level academic? Looking at the origin of the word, it comes from the Medieval Latin doctor meaning religious adviser, teacher, or scholar. You can still observe that meaning in modern words such as doctrine or indoctrination. Towards the end of the 16th century, doctor began to replace the much older word leech, meaning physician. Continue reading →

Cool!

Niall O'Donnell 8 Comments

I’ve written before about how we use words and phrases associated with temperature, and specifically heat, in the English language. Today, I was struck by the word cool, and how it seems to contradict, yet also agree with, some of these words and phrases.

If we consider that we often associate heat with excessive passion and anger, coolness makes sense, describing someone who doesn’t get angry or overly excited easily; who keeps calm and doesn’t get stressed or worried.

And yet, it’s a short step from there to being cold: unfriendly, uncaring and unkind. Things get very confusing when we start talking about blood. Being hot-blooded means getting angry and excited very quickly, and in contrast, a cold-blooded individual is cruel, emotionless, pitiless. They’re at opposite ends of a spectrum, and equally undesirable because of it. One can be harmful to themselves and others by being too quick to anger. On the other hand, one can be so devoid of feeling for other people that they’re willing to do any number of harmful things to them, or fail to intervene, simply because the plight of others stirs no emotion in them. Continue reading →

Eat, Drink, Have

Niall O'Donnell 5 Comments

Imagine the situation:

An English-School classroom, with a Beginner or Elementary class. The teacher has put a picture of someone with a glass of water to their lips.

—What is she doing?

—She is… drinking the water.

—Yes, very good! Now, next…

The teacher now displays an image of someone sitting down to a meal.

—Ok, now can somebody tell me what this person is doing?

—Eating.

—Yes, very good! So, we eat…

—food.

—Yes, and we drink…

—uh, drinks.

—Yes, excellent!

That might seem pretty logical. To eat and To drink are two very common, basic verbs, and students need to understand exactly what they mean and how to use them, don’t they? Well, yes, but how do we really use these two verbs? How often do we really use them? Continue reading →

Semicolon

Niall O'Donnell 17 Comments

Told you.

This is probably the most misused and misunderstood punctuation marks in the English language. What exactly is it, and what does it do?

First of all, it’s clearly a combination of a comma (,) and a colon (:).

A comma is used to separate elements of a sentence, such as items in a list, or clauses (a clause, generally, is a part of a sentence with its own sentence and verb). Most people use commas correctly without thinking about it, and the rules about them aren’t really strict anyway. Basically, you can use in a comma in a sentence where you would pause if you were speaking. Continue reading →

GHOTI

Niall O'Donnell 5 Comments

How do you spell fish?

I’ll give you a few seconds to think about it.

 

*whistles*

*looks out window*

*whistles again*

Ready? Ok, did you say f…i…s…h?

Well, that’s ok I suppose. I mean, it is correct after all.

But wouldn’t you like to try spelling it differently, at least just once? For example, how about… Continue reading →

Click

Niall O'Donnell 3 Comments

Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten what you went in there for? I do that all the time, and had my first experience of the blogging equivalent tonight.

I don’t plan my blog posts too far in advance. Usually when I sit at my computer, something I’d heard or thought about that day will come to mind, or something that I’ve always thought about will leap out at me.

But sometimes an idea for something to write about will come to me, but knowing I won’t do it that day, I’ll make a note of it, and add it to an ever-growing list of topics for future posts. Occasionally I’ll have a look at this list and choose something to write about. I decided to do that tonight, and one word caught my attention straight away:

Click. Continue reading →

Hello

Niall O'Donnell 4 Comments

How’s it going?

What’s the story?

Hey!

How are you?

Hi!

What’s up?

How do you do?

What’s the craic?

We have so many ways to say hello, and they vary around the world. We were talking about this in class today (I had one of my infrequent teaching mornings) and it made me think again of the fact that though we have so many ways to greet someone, we actually don’t say hello very often. Continue reading →