For girls only!

Seriously, the link below is strictly for girls only. Because it’s all about, um, the, er, lady bits.

Understanding the credit crisis

We’re living in scary times, with the financial markets crumbling all around us. Frankly, I don’t even pretend to understand exactly how banks I’d only driven past and never really noticed now require one trillion euros to be saved, but I do have a general idea of how the credit crisis came about. If you want to know (or if you’re cramming for your economics Abitur and can do with some help), invest ten minutes and watch this excellently made video:

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo. (I failed to embed the video, but it’s all vimeo’s fault)

Words you might want to take away:

• mortgage (in homeowner societies, this is an important lexical item in everyday conversation. We call it “Hypothek”, but as more people here rent rather than own their houses, they’re not as common.)
• down payment
• debt
• interest (definition 4)
• to default
• treasury
• return on investment
• the difference between lend and borrow (important in these troubled times!)

By the way, the leverage system nearly froze up at some point last autumn, and for a moment the world teetered on the brink of total financial destruction. It was a scary moment.

Via Andrew Sullivan

And the Pursuit of Happiness – by Maira Kalman

… is a whimsical, poetic, self-deprecating, elated and simply lovely tribute to Inauguration Day. 

I liked this:

But now we are taking a short break from questioning.

Right now, we are opting for naiveté.

“One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.”

For half a year now, classes have been chanting “Yes, we can” at me whenever they found the slightest excuse for it. Yes, even the little ones. The ones that know little more English than the words yes, we and can. Are we looking at an era of classroom-invading presidential catchphrases? As much as I enjoy Mr Obama’s eloquence, I do hope he keeps the infectious slogans to a minimum. They get really old after a while, to be honest. 

A year after the end of the Clinton administration, people were beginning to feel impeachment nostalgia (not really the Bush administration’s fault, though). Hardly anyone is going to feel nostalgia for the years of George W. Bush, arguably the worst president the US has ever had. Except for one standard he set that Obama cannot hope to live up to: as creator of the choicest malapropisms and verbal gaffes since, well, Mrs Malaprop. 

Jacob Weisberg of Slate Magazine has been collecting them for years and celebrates the end of the Bush administration with a collection of The Top 25 Bushisms of All Time. Really, read them all. They won’t come again.

 

NB: When I read through Weisberg’s text again, I misread “the rising cost of malpractice insurance” as “the rising cost of malapropism insurance”. 

Validation

We all need some validation every now and then. If you don’t know what validation is, look it up first, and then watch this 15-minute short film about validation. It’ll make you feel good. 

And don’t forget – YOU ARE AWESOME!

Two words

Fiction

For Germans, fiction isn’t an easy word to translate. Of course, it means something that someone has made up that they want to you believe (“Fiktion”).The second meaning is literary: books can be fiction (On Chesil Beach) or non-fiction (a biography, for instance, or a book about physics) – so fiction is also the word for “Literatur”.”Belletristische Literatur” would be literary fiction. Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction (in this case, the first meaning). 

It is very enlightening to compare the help you get by looking at the DCE or at leo.org. 

Imagination

Imagination is the word you need when you want to translate the German “Phantasie”. Note that fantasy does NOT mean “Phantasie”. Again, leo.org isn’t any help at all; just look at the wide range of translations you get that mean wildly different things. The DCE, however, leaves nothing to the imagination and explains the word really well. 

Got it?

Abysmal Embarrassment, Vol. 1

A note to all the other readers of my blog: my course has quite bravely decided to read Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. Now, don’t get me wrong, this is a very fine novel and the writing is breathtakingly good, but it really is rather embarrassing. 

Charting the depths of English embarrassment (and ineptitude!) when it comes to sexuality will therefore be a recurring topic. What better way to start than with the infamous “Nudge Nudge” Monty Python sketch, in which a stiff-upper-lipped pub customer is assaulted by another man’s almost manic innuendos and double-entendres. See him nudge! See him wink!* And make sure to watch it to the very end, even if it is horribly painful. 

The nudge-nudge guy is a perfect illustration of the word prurient. 

Electing a US president in plain English

Der Englisch-Blog unearthed a very useful video on the US presidential election process.  Before you look at it, head over to the Englisch-Blog and have a look at the neat vocabulary lists. Yesterdays post was a lucid explanation of the difference between politics and policy, by the way. With a Sarah Palin video!

Thank you, Markus. I just needed an excuse to nudge my students into the direction of your blog.

Am I my students’ keeper?

Of course I am. The leopard cannot change its spots – and teachers always feel responsible for their students. And as your keeper, let me tell you that while you may now only see as through a glass, darkly, and may occasionally feel at your wits’ end, remember that in the beginning was the word and that yes, at some point you will find some of the biblical phrases (more  here) introduced into English mainly thourgh the King James Version of 1611 very useful. In fact, a working knowledge of the Bible is highly recommended, not just as a repository of useful gobbets.

Why not make a start by reading the phrases and finding out what they mean? Your rewards will not just be in heaven!

Some water idioms

I’ll be honest. This is a politics post thinly disguised as a language post. Read on, and you’ll see why.

As we all know, water is a dangerous element, which is why teachers don’t like their students to frolic around in it unsupervised. Water idioms reflect this: for instance, you can

• be in deep water: you’re either in trouble or in a difficult situation. Many banks are in deep water these days*.
• be thrown in at the deep end: you’re pushed into a situation where you have to do a difficult job without being prepared for it. Those who enjoy risks can jump in at the deep end by themselves.
• be like a fish out of water: you feel very uncomfortable in a situation.
  
• pour cold water over/on sth: to criticize someone’s plans or ideas so that you make them see the plans are bad and nothing to be excited about.
• be out of your depth: literally (in BE), this means that you are in deep water where you can’t swim**; figuratively, it means that you can’t deal with a situation properly because you don’t understand it.