Tuesday, June 29, 2010

H. W. Fowler, the King of English

By JIM HOLT
Published: December 10, 2009

“To see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sèvres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee,” Evelyn Waugh once said of a fellow writer. I sometimes feel like that chimp, and perhaps you do too. When it comes to handling the English language, we are all fumblers — with the possible exception of Waugh himself, who, as Gore Vidal once observed, wrote “prose so chaste that at times one longs for a violation of syntax to suggest that its creator is fallible, or at least part American.”

Some care about getting English right; others don’t. For those who do, there is a higher authority, a sacred book, that offers guidance through our grammatical vale of tears. Its full title is “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage,” but among its devotees it is known, reverentially, as “Fowler.”

One such devotee was Winston Churchill, who cared greatly about language, even in wartime. “Why must you write ‘intensive’ here?” Churchill demanded of his director of military intelligence while looking over plans for the invasion of Normandy. “ ‘Intense’ is the right word. You should read Fowler’s Modern English Usage on the use of the two words.”

Just who is this Fowler, this supreme arbiter of usage, this master of nuance and scruple, He Who Must Be Obeyed? His full name was Henry Watson Fowler, and he lived from 1858 to 1933. He was educated at the Rugby School and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he failed to take a top degree. For a while he taught classics at a school in Yorkshire (contemporaries there described him variously as “a first-rate swimmer” and “lacking humanity”), but his career as a schoolmaster ended prematurely because of religious doubts. He then tried to make a living as a freelance writer in London, without much luck.

In 1903, he took up a spartan existence with his younger brother, Frank, on the island of Guernsey. Working out of a pair of granite cottages, the Fowler brothers collaborated on a book of usage, which they called “The King’s English.” Despite their amateur status — “We were plunging into the sea of lexicography without having been first taught to swim,” Fowler later wrote — the book was a success. The brothers went on to edit The Concise Oxford Dictionary and were planning a more ambitious book on usage when World War I broke out. Although Henry was 57 at the time, he lied about his age and doggedly petitioned to be sent to the battle front, where he promptly fell ill and had to be sent home. His brother fared worse, dying of tuberculosis at the end of the war. It was left to Henry to complete the work that would make their surname a household word in Britain. “I think of it as it should have been, with its prolixities docked, its dullnesses enlivened, its fads eliminated, its truths multiplied,” he wrote in dedicating it to his brother’s memory. (Nicely put, that!)

The book was published in 1926, to immediate acclaim and brisk sales. Although language, as the truism goes, is an ever changing Heraclitean river, Fowler was not revised until 1965, when Sir Ernest Gowers gave it a light going-over, preserving both the spirit and the substance of the original. (The same cannot be said of the 1996 third edition, heavily reworked by R. W. Burchfield.) Now Oxford University Press has reissued the classic first edition of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage ($29.95), with an acute new introduction by the linguist David Crystal. It is a volume that everyone who aspires to a better command of English should possess and consult — sparingly.

Fowler was fastidious in both manners and morals, but he was no prig. He had a mordant wit and a keen sense of irony, which is part of what makes “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage” such a pleasure to dip into. Despite the title, it’s not really a dictionary. True, there are many entries on spelling and pronunciation (we are informed that the past tense of shampoo can be either “-poo’d” or “-pooed,” for example, and warned against the pronunciation of “enema,” then “in very general use,” as “in-EE-ma”). There are brief and masterly elucidations of fine distinctions in meaning, such as that between “cheerful” and “cheery” (“The cheerful feels & perhaps shows contentment, the cheery shows & probably feels it”).

The bulk of the book, however, consists of little essays. Some of them are heavy going. I have never been able to get through the eight columns of wisdom about the subjunctive, let alone the eleven columns on the troublesome hyphen; nor have I found the impenetrable entry on “nor” much help.

Most entries, though, are as light and whimsical as their (often mysterious) headings, like “Swapping Horses” or “Out of the Frying-Pan.” Under “Frying Pan” we are told, “The writer who produces an ungrammatical, an ugly, or even a noticeably awkward phrase, & lets us see that he has done it in trying to get rid of something else that he was afraid of, gives a worse impression of himself than if he had risked our catching him in his original misdemeanour; he is out of the frying-pan into the fire.” This is followed by the usual surfeit of examples drawn from the contemporary press — e.g., “The reception was held at the bride’s aunt.” (Here the unfortunate writer was evidently trying to avoid “bride’s aunt’s,” but the phrase “at the house of” eluded him.) Fowler reveled in such cock-ups, hoping “to nauseate” the reader “by accumulation of instances, as sweet-shop assistants are cured of larceny by cloying.”

If you are like me, you might be pleased rather than annoyed when others commit such glaring solecisms, since they afford a momentary feeling of superiority. A perusal of Fowler will show you how dangerous that is. I never misuse “aggravate,” “transpire,” “eke out,” “ilk” or “discomfit” (all of which should be looked up in Fowler just for his witty strictures). Yet I now humiliatingly discover that I’ve been a lifelong abuser of “meticulous.” Fowler calls it a “wicked word,” a pretentious and ignorant borrowing from French; properly, it means not “careful,” but “frightened” — indeed, teeth-chatteringly so — coming, as it does, from the Latin metus (fear). My slipshod use of “meticulous” has no doubt been silently deplored all these years by those who have read their Fowler more meticulously — er, punctiliously — than me (or I). That’s the trouble, as Crystal notes in his introduction, with being a stickler for usage: “You must always be watching your back.”

But Fowler was not one of those. For all his classicist rigor, he was a tolerant man who realized that “tilting against established perversions . . . is vanity in more than one sense.” His ideal was a democratic one, a natural, unaffected and humbug-free English summed up in the word “idiom.” And if idiom and grammar are in conflict, so much the worse for grammar. Thus he was cheerfully lax about “who & whom” and the placement of “only,” and he mocked the pains people go through to avoid ending their sentences with prepositions. When it came to the notorious split infinitive (e.g., “to boldly go where no man . . .”), he observed that those English speakers who neither know nor care about them “are to be envied” by the unhappy few who do.

Despite this abundance of common sense, one shouldn’t spend too much time in Fowler’s company. Better writers may be attracted to his volume, but more for random delight than for improvement. It’s wonderful to learn, under “True & False Etymology,” that “belfry” is not named for its bell and that “isle” has nothing to do with “island”: oh, the glorious quirks of English! But heightened self-consciousness about usage is the enemy of vigor. One sees this not infrequently in Fowler’s own prose, which can be crabbed and intricate to the point of intelligibility. One sees it also in disciples of Fowler, who turn out pedanti­cally correct little essays in his honor (which is why I myself have adopted a slovenly, even squalid manner here).

But if you do become yet another obsessive Fowlerian epicure, remember: the pleasures of usage snobbery are best enjoyed in private.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

A Half-baked Idea and A Good Book

I have had a half-baked idea wandering through my mind recently. It has to do with a family tree of punctuation marks. It is still incomplete but new ideas have not flashed in my mind for quite awhile. I'll just dash off what I have so far -

The parenthesis must be the seed from which all punctuation marks came - this is discussed further in my "Parent Thesis Of Punctuation". This thesis is available at the imaginary research site of your choice. The parenthesis are named "left" and "right" with Dad being left and Mom being right because Mom is always right. Right?

Three of the offspring were known as the Marks Brothers - Exclamation, Question and Quotation. They were affectionately known to Mom and Dad as "My Three Signs" and formed, among other things, an advertising agency that tried to further the family. For example, they used slogans such as "Keep your paws off of my pauses!" and "The pauses that refresh!" to help out the commas.

The Marks Brothers even tried awarding prizes for good punctuation - Apo's Trophy being the most noteworthy.

There is some evidence of evolution in the punctuation family, most notably in the semicolon and the colon. Grammarians argue to this day which lead to the other. Each camp dashes off new news releases supporting their point of view regularly.

But there was a spoilsport in the clan and the period put a stop to all of it.

#####

This half-baked effort was inspired by the book EATS, SHOOTS AND LEAVES By Lynne Truss. Here is more information on that book.

To much surprise, this book from a small publisher on the unsexy subject of commas, colons and dashes is proving the UK publishing success of Christmas 2003. There’s good reason for this: it’s witty, thought-provoking, and brief.

Lynne Truss is passionate about punctuation. She confesses to an urgent desire to be the militant wing of the Apostrophe Protection Society, to the extent that she once attempted to demonstrate to the cinema-going public with the aid of an apostrophe on a stick how easy it would be to make the film title “Two Weeks Notice” grammatical.

It is all too obvious that many people do not know how to use this little mark: “Why else,” Ms Truss argues, “would they open a large play area for children, hang up a sign saying ‘Giant Kid’s Playground’, and then wonder why everybody stays away from it? (Answer: everyone is scared of the Giant Kid.)”

Her internal anguish sometimes boils over. “No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, ‘Good food at it’s best’, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.” A little extreme, I feel: boiling in oil would be quite sufficient.

She says in her introduction, “You know those self-help books that give you permission to love yourself? This one gives you permission to love punctuation.” Her own love of the subject turns what might be a dry exposition into a romp. She regrets that marks such as the colon and semi-colon are now much less used than they once were, though she is sure they aren’t necessarily doomed to fade into obscurity. She also regrets that books are losing their value as the main medium of communication in our society and that newer and more egalitarian media may let the barbarians determine the fate of our punctuation systems. (She remarks sadly about the Internet and texting: “By tragic historical coincidence a period of abysmal under-educating in literacy has coincided with this unexpected explosion of global self-publishing”.)

The title comes from a story about a panda in a cafe (so written on the back cover; what a pity she never gets around to discussing accents), which I am told is a cleaned-up version of an old raunchy joke. The panda eats a sandwich, fires a gun in the air and walks towards the door. When the waiter asks in confusion what he thinks he’s doing, the panda throws him a badly punctuated book on wildlife: “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves”.

Some critics have taken great pleasure in pointing out Eats, Shoots & Leaves own grammatical errors. However, Truss is careful to warn readers that she is “not a grammarian” (nor is she her own copyeditor). Whether or not the author has made mistakes is irrelevant; what truly matters is that Truss’s instructions are correct, comprehensible, and wonderfully comical.



Feel free to add your thoughts...


And don't forget! Celebrate the seventh annual National Punctuation Day®!

September 24, 2010

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Heavens To Murgatroyd!

Have you ever used a phrase on the spur of the moment and then found yourself wondering where that phrase came from? I find myself doing that frequently and I always end up fascinated by what I find as I search for a phrase origin.

Just the other day I used "Heavens to Murgatroyd!" in a feigned shocked response to something my wife, Judy, said.

She replied, "Now where do you suppose THAT came from?" And off I went!

Here is what I found.

Meaning

An exclamation of surprise. (Although I would also say that it can be used as an expression of sarcastic or feigned surprise.)

Origin

'Heavens to Murgatroyd' is American in origin and dates from the mid 20th century. The expression was popularized by the cartoon character Snagglepuss - a regular on the Yogi Bear Show in the 1960s, and is a variant of the earlier "heavens to Betsy".

The first use of the phrase wasn't by Snagglepuss but comes from the 1944 film "Meet the People." It was spoken by Bert Lahr, best remembered for his role as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. Snagglepuss's voice was patterned on Lahr's, along with the 'heavens to Murgatroyd' line. Daws Butler's vocal portrayal of the character was so accurate that when the cartoon was used to promote Kellogg Cereals, Lahr sued and made the company distance him from the campaign by giving a prominent credit to Butler.

As with Betsy, we have no idea who Murgatroyd was. The various spellings of the name - as Murgatroid, Mergatroyd or Mergatroid tend to suggest that it wasn't an actual surname. While it is doubtful that the writers of Meet The People (Sig Herzig and Fred Saidy) were referring to an actual person, they must have got the name from somewhere.

No fewer than ten of the characters in Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera Ruddigore, 1887, are baronets surnamed "Murgatroyd", eight of whom (or is that which?) are ghosts. Herzig and Saidy were well versed in the works of the musical theatre and that plethora of Murgatroyds would have been known to them.

Where then did the librettist Sir William Gilbert get the name? It seems that Murgatroyd has a long history as a family name in the English aristocracy. In his genealogy The Murgatroyds of Murgatroyd, Bill Murgatroyd states that, in 1371, a constable was appointed for the district of Warley in Yorkshire. He adopted the name of Johanus de Morgateroyde - literally John of Moor Gate Royde or "the district leading to the moor".

Whether the Murgatroyd name took that route from Yorkshire to Jellystone Park we can't be certain. Unless there's a Betsy Murgatroyd hiding in the archives, that's as close as we are likely to get to a derivation.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

More 2am Questions

How come the word abbreviation is so long?

Wouldn’t the opposite of abbreviate be breviate?

Would anyone ever look up the word dictionary in the dictionary?

Is there something spellbinding about dictionaries?

How come there is no verb form of the word verb?

Since pronoun is a noun, why isn’t proverb a verb?

Can you recite a list of nouns verbatim?

Do verbose people ever use nouns?

Do this sentence need reverberation?

Doesn’t the word syntax sound rather more political than scholarly?

How come there is no anagram for anagram?

Why doesn’t the word umlaut have one?

Wouldn’t analogy be a good synonym for proctology?

Why didn’t they call a palindrome something like a palinilap or emordrome?

Wouldn’t you say most novels are not?

What’s the word for when you can’t think of the word?

Why is number abbreviated as “no.” when there is no “o”?

Why is phraseology only one word?

Shouldn’t there be a shorter word for monosyllabic?

What is the opposite of opposite?

Why isn’t acronym an acronym of something?

Is slang short for “sloppy language?”

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Which Hunting With James Thurber

American humorist James Thurber (1894-1961), best known for his short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," once wrote, "Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other." In this essay, which first appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 1929, Thurber introduces several examples to demonstrate both his fascination and frustration with a familiar English pronoun.


Which

by James Thurber (1894-1961)

The relative pronoun “which” can cause more trouble than any other word, if recklessly used. Foolhardy persons sometimes get lost in which-clauses and are never heard of again. My distinguished contemporary, Fowler, cites several tragic cases, of which the following is one: “It was rumored that Beaconsfield intended opening the Conference with a speech in French, his pronunciation of which language leaving everything to be desired . . ." That’s as much as Mr. Fowler quotes because, at his age, he was afraid to go any farther. The young man who originally got into that sentence was never found. His fate, however, was not as terrible as that of another adventurer who became involved in a remarkable which-mire. Fowler has followed his devious course as far as he safely could on foot: “Surely what applies to games should also apply to racing, the leaders of which being the very people from whom an example might well be looked for . . ." Not even Henry James could have successfully emerged from a sentence with “which,” “whom,” and “being” in it. The safest way to avoid such things is to follow in the path of the American author, Ernest Hemingway. In his youth he was trapped in a which-clause one time and barely escaped with his mind. He was going along on solid ground until he got into this: “It was the one thing of which, being very much afraid--for whom has not been warned to fear such things--he . . .” Being a young and powerfully built man, Hemingway was able to fight his way back to where he had started, and begin again. This time he skirted the treacherous morass in this way: “He was afraid of one thing. This was the one thing. He had been warned to fear such things: Everybody has been warned to fear such things.” Today Hemingway is alive and well, and many happy writers are following along the trail he blazed.

What most people don’t realize is that one “which” leads to another. Trying to cross a paragraph by leaping from “which” to “which” is like Eliza crossing the ice. The danger is in missing a “which” and falling in. A case in point is this: “He went up to a pew which was in the gallery, which brought him under a colored window which he loved and always quieted his spirit.” The writer, worn out, missed the last “which”--the one that should come just before “always” in that sentence. But supposing he had got it in! We would have: “He went up to a pew which was in the gallery, which brought him under a colored window which he loved and which always quieted his spirit.” Your inveterate whicher in this way gives the effect of tweeting like a bird or walking with a crutch, and is not welcome in the best company.

It is well to remember that one “which” leads to two and that two “whiches” multiply like rabbits. You should never start out with the idea that you can get by with one “which.” Suddenly they are all around you. Take a sentence like this: “It imposes a problem which we either solve, or perish.” On a hot night, or after a hard day’s work, a man often lets himself get by with a monstrosity like that, but suppose he dictates that sentence bright and early in the morning. It comes to him typed out by his stenographer and he instantly senses that something is the matter with it. He tries to reconstruct the sentence, still clinging to the “which,” and gets something like this: “It imposes a problem which we either solve, or which, failing to solve, we must perish on account of.” He goes to the water-cooler, gets a drink, sharpens his pencil, and grimly tries again. “It imposes a problem which we either solve or which we don’t solve . . ." He begins once more: “It imposes a problem which we either solve, or which we do not solve, and from which . . .” The more times he does it the more “whiches” he gets. The way out is simple: “We must either solve this problem, or perish.” Never monkey with “which.” Nothing except getting tangled up in a typewriter ribbon is worse.

"Which," by James Thurber, was first published in The New Yorker magazine in 1929 and reprinted in Thurber's The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities, Harper, 1931.

PS - Happy Birthday M.C. Escher!

Monday, June 14, 2010

"I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar."

Alabama law student turns judge with book on poor grammar

By The Associated Press
December 21, 2009, 11:56AM

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. -- Sharon Eliza Nichols' quiet, polite voice doesn't sound like it belongs to the type of person who would author a book called "I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar."

I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar

But when Nichols begins to talk about the experience of writing a book, a more fun, even mischievous, side comes out.

"I think you've really made it when you get hate mail," said the 25-year-old University of Alabama law student, laughing. "I got one the other day that said I was un-American and I should be focusing on important things."

But most of the responses Nichols has received on her book have been positive, so much so that the publisher has ordered a second printing.

Nichols, an avid blogger, started a Facebook group in 2007 called "I judge you when you use poor grammar."

She created the group out of boredom, figured a few of her friends would join, they'd laugh about it and that would be the end.

Instead, the group has grown to more than 400,000 members who have uploaded more than 10,000 examples of poor grammar, from business signs to T-shirts to hair gel labels.

In fall 2007, The New York Times caught wind of the group and interviewed Nichols for a story.

"It just kind of snowballed from there," Nichols said. "My agent contacted me and said that he thought we had a great idea for a book."

So Nichols asked all the members of her Facebook group to start e-mailing her the pictures that now comprise her book, which she completed by writing short and snarky captions for each picture.

The publisher ordered 15,000 copies of the book for the first printing, and Nichols said 7,500 are scheduled for the next.

"It's amazing, and I was really shocked," she said. "I know I don't have 15,000 friends, so it's not just them who are buying it."

When asked why she thinks the book has been so successful, Nichols said it goes back to just how important language is to life.

"I can't explain the reasons why people care about this certain thing above other things, except to say that words are the one thing that bring us all together and the foundation of how we communicate with each other," she said.

Nichols said that if the second printing sells out, as well, she is considering doing a second book.

"I'm really not sure what that would look like, but there are a lot of possibilities," she said. "We could do one themed around retail stores, or we could do another book of assorted pictures.

"It really depends on what the publisher thinks."

Nichols, who is from Troy, is in her third year of law school and said she would like to end up in Washington, D.C., eventually.

"I'm open to a lot of possibilities, but maybe something behind the scenes politically," she said.

Nichols said the book, which has helped her pay off some of her student loans, has been a welcome surprise in her life.

"The perfect word for it is a blessing," she said.

(Wayne Grayson of The Tuscaloosa News authored this report.)

Friday, June 11, 2010

The Grammar Addict

From The Reading Post (That is in England, folks) -

The war on poor grammar
By Anna Roberts
April 25, 2008

A self-confessed grammar addict is on a one-man mission to purge Reading of its punctuation problems and spelling struggles.

The man – who will go only by his first name Jonathan – has gone around the town photographing signs where spelling errors and grammar crimes are committed.

He even reads the Evening Post attempting to find errors and photographing stories and newspaper bills – posters advertising articles – which tickle him.

Then he uploads all his findings on to the massive, 4,500-people strong Facebook page “I live in Reading… Fear me”.

Jonathan’s targets include shops, supermarkets and buses.

A sign outside a Cemetery Junction shop window which reads ‘Tuitor available. For home tuition GCSE and A-level in chemistry, biology, sciences etc’ gets the treatment.

“Would you want a tuitor tutoring your children?” Jonathan asks.

He has also taken a picture of an A-board for an Indian furniture shop in Reading. The billboard picture includes the sign ‘Looking is free’.

“Phew! I’m glad there’s no charge for looking,” Jonathan said, presumably sarcastically.

A board advertising a bag shop through ‘Sainsbary’ in Broad Street is also focused on by the grammar-keen 36-year-old.

But Jonathan, from Earley, does not just focus on poor punctuation in the town centre. He also turns his attention to the Sainsbury’s Local store in Shinfield Road.

A frankly nonsensical sign said: ‘Customer Notice. Due to store End week, Every Saturday we are close by 22.45 hours. Our apologies for any inconvinance.’

And it is lucky for this shop they give fines for illegal parking, rather than bad spelling.

The sign read: ‘Parking for Bargain Booze customers only. Unathorised vehicles will be clamped. Release fee £150.’

Jonathan took the next example of poor punctuation to heart, particularly as it came from Kings Road-based Thames Valley University.

A ticket produced by the university advertising a party read: ‘Your Unique.’

The next picture Jonathan took was at Arthur Hill Swimming Pool in East Reading.

The pool proudly advertises a ‘Family/hanging room.’

Now we can only presume the pool means this is where towels are hung, but you never know.

A particularly genius ‘bargain’ at Sainsbury’s advertised this cut-price Guinness at £3.99.

Great, you think.

However, the alcohol was already – as Jonathan’s picture shows – being sold at this price.

Sales advisor Jonathan admitted: “On the face of it, taking pictures of crap spelling could probably be construed as a little sad.”

- Noticed any spelling mishaps in town? Contact Anna Roberts on (0118) 918 3063 or email aroberts@reading-epost.co.uk


A good article that was made even better by the first comment -

I am that grammar addict, and I couldn't help noticing the gift delivery shop by the escalators in the Broad Street Mall that says, in large letters across the top, that it does "Local, National and Internal Deliveries". Shurely shome mishtake?

Jonathan, Reading

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

A Poem and A Quiz

I get quite a few fun emails from friends and family. I want to share two of them with you
today. One is a poem of sorts and the other is a quiz. I know that these have been around
the internet for many years but they are good friends playing in the word farm. Go ahead!
Enjoy the poem and take the quiz. No one else is watching you take the quiz. Really!


Lets face it
English is a stupid language.
There is no egg in the eggplant
No ham in the hamburger
And neither pine nor apple in the pineapple.
English muffins were not invented in England
French fries were not invented in France.

We sometimes take English for granted
But if we examine its paradoxes we find that
Quicksand takes you down slowly
Boxing rings are square
And a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

If writers write, how come fingers don't fing.
If the plural of tooth is teeth
Shouldn't the plural of phone booth be phone beeth
If the teacher taught,
Why didn't the preacher praught.

If a vegetarian eats vegetables
What on earth does a humanitarian eat!?
Why do people recite at a play
Yet play at a recital?
Park on driveways and
Drive on parkways
How can the weather be as hot as hell on one day
And as cold as hell on another

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy
Of a language where a house can burn up as
It burns down
And in which you fill in a form
By filling it out
And a bell is only heard once it goes!

English was invented by people, not computers
And it reflects the creativity of the human race
(Which of course isn't a race at all)

That is why When the stars are out they are visible
But when the lights are out they are invisible
And why it is that when I wind up my watch
It starts
But when I wind up this poem
It ends.

#####


Below are four ( 4 ) questions and a bonus question...

You have to answer them instantly. You can't take your time, answer all of them immediately .

OK?!

Let's find out just how clever you really are....


First Question :
You are participating in a race. You overtake the second person. What position are you in?


Answer: If you answered that you are first, then you are absolutely wrong! If you overtake the second person and you take his place, you are second!

Try not to screw up next time.

Now answer the second question, but don't take as much time as you took for the first question.

OK ?





Second Question :
If you overtake the last person, then you are...?


Answer: If you answered that you are second to last, then you are wrong again. Tell me, how can you overtake the LAST Person?


You're not very good at this, are you?

Third Question :

Very tricky arithmetic! This must be done in your head ONLY Do not use paper & pencil
or a calculator.. Try it



Take 1000 and add 40 to it. Now add another 1000 ... Now add 30 .. Add another 1000 . .. Now add 20 .... Now add another 1000 Now add 10 ... What is the total?


Did you get 5000 ?

The correct answer is actually 4100.

If you don't believe it, check it with a calculator!

Today is definitely not your day, is it?


Maybe you'll get the last question right...

Fourth Question :

Mary's father has five daughters:

1.Nana, 2.Nene, 3.Nini, 4.Nono.



What's the name of the fifth daughter?

Did you Answer Nunu?

NO .... Of course it isn't.

Her name is Mary.



Read the question again!




Okay, now the
Bonus Round :

A mute person goes into a shop and wants to buy a toothbrush.. By imitating the action
of brushing his teeth he successfully expresses himself to the shopkeeper and the purchase is done. Next, a blind man comes into the shop who wants to buy a pair of sunglasses; how does HE indicate what he wants?


He just has to open his mouth and ask...

It's really very simple !


Keep smiling!!

Saturday, June 5, 2010

A Lesson From A Friend

Last year sometime a friend of mine posted something on his blog on the spur of the moment and was sorry he did. He has since passed on and his blog is gone but he always reminded me of his lesson learned. Here is the post -

The verb "cleave" is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: adhere and separate.

A comment was posted...

What about the word "clip"?
1. To fasten with or as if with a clip; hold tightly
2. To cut, cut off, or cut out

That was followed by...

Patronize is the same as clip and cleave.

If you patronize someone, you are either supporting him or berating him.

Someone else chimed in...

Also "to sanction" in the senses of "to allow" and "to prohibit".


I decided to see if I could find more and was amazed to find the following. I have no doubt that there are more examples but these will suffice for now.

bolt - secure, run away

by - multiplication (e.g.,multiplying three by five), division (e.g., dividing eight by four)

custom - usual, special

dust - add fine particles, remove fine particles

enjoin - prescribe, prohibit

fast - quick, unmoving

first degree - most severe (e.g., murder), least severe (e.g., burn)

garnish - enhance (e.g., food), curtail (e.g., wages)

left - remaining, departed from

off - off, on (e.g., "the alarm went off")

out - visible (e.g., stars are out), invisible (e.g., lights out)

put out - extinguish, generate (e.g., something putting out light)

sanction - approve, boycott

screen - show, hide

strike - hit, miss (in baseball)

table - propose (in the United Kingdom), set aside (in the United States)

transparent - invisible, obvious

wear - endure through use, decay through use

weather - withstand, wear away

wind up - end, start up (e.g., a watch)


And that winds up this post.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Some Fun Facts

Here are some fun facts and some challenges to a few of them.

10% of the world's population speak English as their mother tongue (Chinese 21%, Spanish 6%, Russian 6%, Malay 4%, Hindi 4%, Japanese 3%, Arabic 3%, Portuguese 3%, French 2%, German 2%)

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The combination "ough" can be pronounced in nine different ways. The following sentence contains them all: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."
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I had read in a few places that the verb "cleave" is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: adhere and separate. Really? Well, what about What about the word "clip"? To fasten with or as if with a clip; hold tightly but also to cut, cut off, or cut out. It also seems that "patronize" is the same as clip and cleave since if you patronize someone, you are either supporting him or berating him. Also "to sanction" means "to allow" and "to prohibit".
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"Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt". Really? What about unkempt? Or "attempt", "preempt", "contempt" and "exempt"? Oh! They end in "mpt" not "mt"! Did you fall into the trap?

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The alarm clock was not invented by the Marquis de Sade, as some suspect, but rather by a man named Levi Hutchins of Concord, New Hampshire, in 1787. Perversity, though, characterized his invention from the beginning. The alarm on his clock could ring only at 4 am. Rumor has it that Hutchins was murdered by his wife at 4:05 am on a very dark and deeply cold New England morning.

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A variation of fun facts in the English Language are the many place names in the UK with funny names.

On the border with Essex and Hertfordshire in England is a village called Ugley.

Practically every village or small town in the UK has a branch of an organisation called the Women's Institute. It's where the local ladies meet socially, invite speakers to talk about any subject under the sun, have competitions, make jam, make cakes, have weekly sales of all produce - locally grown fruit, vegetables, home made cakes and all sorts of goodies or whatever..whatever...

Each village Institute is called the (*name of village*) Women's Institute.

The village of Ugley has a branch of the Women's Institute.

It's the Ugley Women's Institute and is one of the most well known in the country for some reason.

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Some other great names - Frisby On The Wreake, Nether Poppleton. Great Snoring is my personal favorite! It is right next to Little Snoring.