Words and their origins: Often not what you thought

The Case of Soccer and Football

The European Championchip is in its last week, the English team is still playing and it is high time that I write my football/soccer related post before the tournament is over and football talk will rest for two years before it resumes with the World Cup 2026. Taking place in North America and Mexico, there will probably then be more soccer talk than football talk, at least among the hosts.

Why DO Americans call what (almost) everyone else calls football ‘soccer’? And why do they call a game pretty obviously hardly played with any feet ‘football’. American football comes across as a (rougher) version of rugby, so why wasn’t it called American Rugby?

Continue reading

We thought we would never have to talk about ‘You know …..’again

Update 2024: Read all about the DNC in Chicago 2024 Democratic National Convention – Wikipedia Also: Democratic Convention 2024 – Videos ; The DNC in five minutes; 11 hours of DNC (highlights from Day 3)

Is it arrogance of the educated and privileged? Or deep-rooted feelings of decency and of moral and ethical beliefs so badly violated by Mr T. that we cannot understand how any American can support him?

After the election of Joe Biden in 2020, we probably all believed the topic of Trump would be history. We had wasted enough of our time, and emotional and intellectual energy and were happy to move on.

Ooops, no such luck. So here we are again, trying to understand.

Continue reading

Are you an extrovert or an introvert?

The article and quiz ‘Are you an extrovert or an introvert (and why it matters) (link below) is related to a TEDtalk from 2012 by Susan Cain; Quiet: The Power of Introverts. This issue has forcefully come up again during corona times in connection with how people feel about having to work alone from home.

In relation to this, the BBC article Why introverts excelled at working from home deals with the question what kind of personality types are supported by which kind of work. Or in other words: do ‘traditional’ office jobs favor louder, more visible and extroverted people at the expense of introverts – whose time has now come?

Are you an extrovert or an introvert (and why it matters)

How would we like to work?

During the pandemic, the topics of work-life balance, healthy work environments, satisfying work etc. came even more into focus than they had before. Work environments underwent dramatic changes in various lockdown situations. Whereas in many jobs or professions, employees and workers had no choice as to continue going to their respective work places, others, especially office workers, experienced working from home as a new normal.

Towards the end of the pandemic or the emergency situations, discussions intensified about how people wanted to work in future: which changes induced by the pandemic situation would they like to keep, where would they like to go back to how things were before – if at all – and what was truly missed.

Continue reading

What is a week?

In the UK and several other countries, research institutes and companies are trying out different ways of working. One such project is the trial run of a four day week instead of the traditional five. Below you find an adaptation of the text from The Guardian, supplemented with a little gap-filling exercise.

One of the research institutes involved in this project is the thinktank Autonomy. On their website you find a little video titled Change the Week.

Continue reading

Guess the movie

The image above is from one of my favorite films adapted from one of my favorite books that I happen to be rereading at the moment. I would say it also qualifies as a classic of film history.

I’ve been going through my collection of material – something I do every once in a while – and came across these little film synopses you find below. In the past, each of my course participants would get one to read out loud and for the others to guess. Simple little exercise, but I’m always relieved that there is at least a little common cultural ground we share, even if only some classic movies we all seem to have seen.

Continue reading

Green Cities

The image above is from an article on the webpage of the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome about an algorithm that is said to have found the greenest city in the world. Do you recognize the city?

Tim Bowen from onestopenglish created a Guardian Weekly lesson on How to Get Cars out of Cities.

With one of my groups, we never got past the warmer question that asked us to put a list of six cities into a ranking order of ‘greenness’. The discussion triggered by this task was about why these cities had made the list, who had come up with the ranking and, most importantly, what were the criteria for being considered a green city.

Continue reading

Talking about the future

Very often, the verb system of English, and maybe also of other languages, is described under the aspect of time. In German, this even finds its expression in the grammar term ‘Zeiten’ for different verb structures. Though not completely incorrect, this creates a focus that places too much emphasis on ‘time’, thereby giving learners of English a distorted perspective on the various aspects and/or meanings of verb structures.

Continue reading

‘Words for Nerds’

Do you know what a finial is? In one of the Spotlight issues from 2020, Judith Gilbert, writer, editor and translator, wrote a little column titled ‘Words for Nerds’. Here she lists a number of words most people probably never heard of, and which demonstrate that it is impossible to know all the words of any language. They are all nouns denoting special little items of everyday life. See if you can find out what they are with the help of internet images. Do you know the term for the thing in your own native language?

Continue reading

Oscars Potpourri – a selection of ideas

The 94th Academy Awards ceremony will take place on March 27. Again a little later than its pre-pandemic February date. If you like to learn more about the award itself, wikipedia is the place to go.

This year’s nomination ceremony has already taken place and can be watched on youtube.

I always like going through the Oscar nomination ballot sheet that lists all categories and films. It offers great general vocabulary practice, not just specifically film related. Going through the titles, finding out if anyone has already watched some of the nominated films, looking at trailers and synopsies of the films – all this I always find quite enjoyable even if – in most cases – we haven’t seen so many of the films.

Continue reading