English

Daily Prompt: Protest

Niall O'Donnell 6 Comments

via Daily Prompt: Protest

What’s the difference between the following words in bold:

I’d like to protest about my treatment!

I’m going to a protest about the treatment of refugees tomorrow.

If you’re linguistically minded, or simply very smart, you may have answered that even though they look identical, the first one is a verb, and the second a noun. You can tell from the context of the sentences. But if you were listening to someone recite those sentences, there’d be another clue to help you know the difference. Think about how you’d say both, or say them both out loud, if it’s not too embarrassing, and see if you can figure out the clue.

If you’re still not sure of the difference, here’s a visual aid: Continue reading →

Discover Challenge: Tough Questions

Niall O'Donnell 8 Comments

via Discover Challenge: Tough Questions

Do you think you have to deal with tough questions sometimes? Well count yourself lucky, if you’re a native English speaker, as if you’re an English learner, almost all questions are tough questions. Most of us don’t realise how easy we have it, never having to learn how to form questions, instead picking it up naturally. Even the most commonplace questions are surprisingly complex in their structure. For example: Continue reading →

-ish

Niall O'Donnell 3 Comments

“What colour are you painting the living room?”

“Ecru.”

“What?”

“You know, ecru. Kind of like magnolia, or eggshell.”

“Huh?”

“Whiteish.”

“Ah, ok! Why didn’t you just say that then?”

Is there a more useful suffix than -ish?

Sometimes we really don’t want to express ourselves in too extreme a way. If we don’t want to say something is fantastic or amazing, we can say it’s nice. Or, if it’s better than that, it’s great…ish. Continue reading →

Drink

Niall O'Donnell 9 Comments

Even if grammatically there’s only a small difference in aspect, in terms of meaning, there’s an entire world of difference between:

Are you drinking?

and

Do you drink?

As I’ve pondered on before, we actually don’t really use the verbs to eat or to drink very often, or at least not as often as how we each teach them would lead a learner to expect. To have tends to cover any situation where we could use either. But I was just thinking today how particularly loaded the word (to) drink can be, with its meaning changing a lot depending on the context or the tense we use. Have a look at these examples: Continue reading →

Dank Memes

Niall O'Donnell 19 Comments

If you’re young and hip like me, you’ll have come across the term dank meme, and know that a dank meme is a cool image or video that becomes popular. Goes viral, if you will.

Though the word meme is strongly associated with internet culture, it’s got a longer history than you might imagine. The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 work on evolutionary biology, The Selfish Gene. It referred to an idea, behaviour, or style that spreads between individuals within a culture. A particular fashion or popular opinion that spreads quickly, like a virus, could be considered a meme. Dawkins came up with the theory of the meme in a book on evolution, as he considered that ideas could be under the same pressures to adapt and replicate as biological organisms. Continue reading →

Despatches from the Uncanny Valley

Niall O'Donnell 8 Comments

The term uncanny is a hard one to pin down. It can be traced back to the 16th century, when it meant mischievous, and it came to be used in Scotland and the north of England in the 18th century to mean associated with the supernatural. It’s more modern applications, however, were inspired by the work of Sigmund Freud.

In his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche, Freud used the German word unheimlich to refer to objects which we project our repressed desires onto. These objects might be everyday things which are rendered strange to us when we see them in this new light. The term was translated as uncanny in English, and came to refer to the sensation of the familiar rendered somehow unfamiliar in a manner that’s difficult to explain or identify. This cognitive dissonance, the simultaneous familiarity and unfamiliarity of something, is at the heart of the effect of the uncanny. Continue reading →

Too Many Cucks

Niall O'Donnell 16 Comments

Cuck seems to be the insult du jour, especially since the American presidential election. It’s primarily used by members of the alt-right movement, though I’m loathe to dignify those who identify themselves so with anything approaching membership of an actual political movement. The alt-right claim that they’re offering an alternative to traditional conservative politics in the United States, but to be honest, they just seem to me to be a formless mass of vaguely-connected misogynists, racists, and people who generally seem to be unhappy with themselves, and project that self-loathing outwards. All that seems to unite the alt-right is hatred.

Hatred and fedoras.

What do they mean when they call people cucks? It’s become a kind of catch-all insult, but I have heard it described as referring to people who support the advancement of others over the advancement of their country. Which seems like a really tortuous attempt to link its use with its original meaning. Cuck is an abbreviation of cuckold, which for most of its history, has referred to a man whose wife is having an affair with another man/men. It comes from the old French cucuault meaning cuckoo, the bird that lays its eggs in other birds’ nests. Continue reading →