English

Father’s Day

Niall O'Donnell 5 Comments

It’s Father’s Day today in many parts of the world. I hope you’re being well treated if you’re one of the men honoured by the day. You really never can have too many pairs of socks. Like Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, it’s quite an artificial day, but I don’t mind too much really, as sometimes maybe we need a little push to be grateful. Or to at least express our gratitude.

The word father, like mother, isn’t one we actually use all that much of course, instead preferring works like dad, pop, papa et al. These words, like so many of our words to refer to our mothers, are derived from our first babblings as a child.

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Roaming Charges

Niall O'Donnell 6 Comments

On Thursday 15th June 2017, roaming charges were abolished within the EU. And there was much rejoicing. Roaming charges were one of those things that for a long time I kind of just accepted. Living in Ireland, the rest of Europe usually felt far away enough that it seemed somehow appropriate that using my phone would be more expensive whenever I went there. But recently I drove for about 45 minutes from Belgium to the Netherlands, and suddenly it seemed entirely absurd that I had to pay a fortune (rather than nothing) for using data, just because I’d crossed a fairly arbitrary line. Why should it cost more in a different country? Was I inconveniencing the phone company in some way? Did they have to do more work to drag the data over the border and into my phone?

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Bloomsday

Niall O'Donnell 11 Comments

Today is Bloomsday, which is perhaps not the best-known day of celebration. It’s a celebration of all things James Joyce, and more specifically, his great novel Ulysses (1922). Bloomsday always falls on 16 June, because that’s the day on which the book is set (in 1904). And it’s named Bloomsday in honour of the novel’s hero, Leopold Bloom. And of course his wife Molly Bloom too, who has a very important part to play in the book. Why though, would we have a day of celebration for a single book?

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Hung or Hanged?

Niall O'Donnell 14 Comments

This is a common question for English speakers: which is correct.? As usual, the real answer is complex, and possibly even interesting. But first, the simple answer: we use hung to refer to hanging an inaminate object, and hanged to refer to hanging a person. And if you find that hard to remember, don’t worry!: there are plenty of people out there who will be more than happy to correct you if you get it wrong! But I wonder: would they be able to explain to you why you’re wrong?

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Who’da Thunk it!?

Niall O'Donnell 29 Comments

The English language has a complicated relationship with rules. Almost every major grammar rule you can think has at least a few exceptions. But then there are a few unwritten rules that English speakers adhere strictly to, even when we’re not aware of it. Still, English isn’t generally a stickler for the rules, which makes sense considering it’s quite a mongrel language. This is why I prefer to think of English as having patterns and trends, as opposed to rules. Today, I want to look at one of those trends. To do so, I’ll begin by asking you to consider what the following words have in common:

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“I’m Sorry Dave. I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That.”

Niall O'Donnell 17 Comments

On Sunday, I naturally found myself thinking about how scary a mummy actually is, as a horror character. I think I’m with Homer Simpson on this one:

Ooh, pretty creepy. Still, I’d rather have him chasing me than the Wolfman.

Even more naturally enough, for me anyway, this in turn got me thinking about how we talk about being afraid in English. It’s quite easy to translate adjectives like afraid, scared and frightened into other languages because fear is such a primal feeling that we tend to think of it in the same way across languages. Terror and horror might be more complex, but the basic sense of fear is one we all recognise. A sentence like…

I’m afraid of spiders.

… isn’t hard to translate, or for a learner of English to understand. But what about this famous line from 2001: A Space Odyssey:

I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that. 

Imagine you’re an English teacher and you have to explain a) what I’m afraid means in this case, and b), why we specifically use I’m afraid instead of other phrases. The first task’s not too bad: you could just say it means I’m sorry, and that’d be good enough. But what about explaining why we use it?

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Hacked!

Niall O'Donnell 4 Comments

The verb to hack, in a computer-related sense, has been around since the 80s, though it seems to be more prevalent recently, thanks mainly to the hacking scandals surrounding last year’s American Presidential Election, as well as the many less important scandals which pop up on the news fairly regularly. It’s not surprising really that nowadays, hacking is synonymous specifically with computer hacking, given how integrated computers are into every aspect of life.

Of course you’re probably aware that that’s not the original meaning of the word.

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