Welcome to Hell...Town

Source: Speak Up

Standard: American accent

Language level: Advanced

Welcome to Hell!

The state of Michigan in the US Midwest is home to Detroit, capital of the nation’s automotive industry. Not only that, it is the birthplace of many famous Americans, including the late political activist Malcom X and, more recently, singers like Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin and Madonna, basketball player Magic Johnson and film director, Michael Moore. Moore was from the depressed industrial town of Flint, which he helped put on the map with his first documentary, Roger and Me, in 1989.

Michigan is also home to a smaller town: Hell, Legend has it that this bizarre name was born out of a linguistic misunderstanding. In the 1830s some German travelers were passing through on a stagecoach. When they stepped out to admire the view one of them remarked that it was “so schon under hell,” meaning “so beautiful and bright.” The locals overheard this and the name stuck. 170 years later the town hasn’t grown much. Residents say the population is only 72: according to Wikipedia, it is 266. The town consists of a few houses and stores and its main source of income is the sale of kitsch souvenirs with a diabolical theme. Ron Douguay, for example, makes “supremely evil pizza” at the Hell Country Store. He says that he and his colleagues are always on the look-out for events that could help business:

Ron Dougay

Standard: American accent

Believes it or not, there’s only three stores here. I mean, this is the town, that’s all it is, but every year we seem to get something more…we pinpoint certain dates, like Halloween is big, Friday 13^th is big, anything that goes against…oh, gosh, you hate to say it, but, you know, anything, bad luck, or evil, so to speak, we try to, you know, capitalize on that and make some money off it, so we kind of promote it on, you know, radio stations and in the papers and things like that.

THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST

In actual fact June 6^th 2006 was to provide the citizens of Hell with a wonderful opportunity:

Ron Dougay:

The date 6/6/6, you know, like the number of the Beast, so to speak, in the Bible, it’s a big deal, you know, since we’re Hell, you know, people kind of put two and two together and it snowballed – pardon the pun! – but it got really big, we got like 12.000 people out here and they were lined up for gosh, 2…300 yards out the store and they bought everything in the Hell Country Store that we had. Everything was gone.

AND IN ANN ARBOR…

If you decide to “go to Hell” – the one is Michigan, that is – you might also want to go to “Paradise,” which is in the northern part of the state. Hell itself is about 20 miles (32 km) from Ann Arbor. This is home to the prestigious University of Michigan which, trivia fans may like to know, was where the young Madonna was briefly a dance major.

According to local resident Dan Mazur, Ann Arbor is the all-American community:

Dan Mazur

Standard: American accent

Well, here is the US now many people are expressing a desire for what they call “American Values” and, when they express this, really what they’re talking about are Midwestern values. Ann Arbor is clearly in the Midwest of the United States, halfway between the East Coast and the West Coast. Midwestern values, unfortunately for some, though, imply small town America and Ann Arbor has that flavor to it, but it also has the University of Michigan here and the capital of Pfizer and is close to the automotive center of the United States as well, so we have the Midwestern lifestyle, the small-town feel to it, but very dynamic and international culture. And so that gives us a lot of appeal both to tourists who come here, but also to small business that…very hi-tech-oriented and…bring a lot of wealth to our area, and so it’s a very dynamic culture.

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Strange Stories

Language level: Basic

Source: Speak Up

Standard: British and NZ accents

STRANGE HISTORIES

Musical Madness

SCOTTLAND THE BRAVE

Scotland’s Ben Nevis is the highest mountain in Britain so it was a big surprise when volunteers, who were removing rubbish, found a piano near the mountain’s 1.350m peak this summer. Volunteer Nigel Hawking says: “We couldn’t believe our eyes! It was under a pile of stones. The only thing missing was the keyboard, and that’s another mystery…”

Well, 64-year-old Kenny Campbell has all the answers: “It was an organ. I carried it to the summit and played Scotland the Brave up there. That was 1971…after we sold the keys for charity.” He returned two months after his performance, but couldn’t find the organ: someone had buried it under the stones.

AIR GUITAR!

Every teenage boy has stood in his bedroom, listening to his favourite rock song and pretending to play an imaginary guitar in front of the mirror. Well, some of these “air guitarists” will see their dreams come true on September 5, 6 and 7, at the Air Guitar World Championships, in Oulu, Finland. Here contestants, dressed from head to toe is spandex and bandannas will “play” to 10.000 screaming fans. National champs from 17 countries will take part in the competition, which starts with the traditional High Altitude Training Camping, goes on to a Qualifying Round, and reaches its peak at the AGWC Final on September 7, at the biggest rock club in Finland: Club Teatria. At last year’s Guildford music festival, 4.000 people mimed to the Guns ‘n’ Roses song “Sweet Child o’ Mine” and created the first world record for an air guitar ensemble.

Family Album, XX

Source: Family Album

The Tower of Babel

The Tower of Babel

Source: Speak Up

       A fifth of the planet speaks English competently. Another sixth is learning. 80 per cent of computer information is in English, as are Deutsche Bank board meetings.

       Yet the notion of one language for all sounds familiar. Remember Genesis, Chapter 11? Humans build the Tower of Babel up to Heaven. God doesn’t like it. He replaces the single languages that let us cooperate with today’s multilingual babble.

       Can English recapture monolingual paradise?

COCAINE GLUE

       Automated translator, like Babel Fish (this strange name comes from Douglas Adam’s science fiction comedy, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galax) seem to offer instant solutions. But here’s a typical computer translation: “I apologize for my (bad) English: I am Brazilian and as it’s know, nobody is perfect. Kindly, is it comprehensible what do I have written?” In Brazil’s Fortaleza Airport, you’ll find Bleeding jar and Cocaine Glue on the drinks menu: meaningless translations for jar of sangria and Coca Cola. Worst still, Pepsi’s slogan, Come alive with pepsi, was translated into Chinese as “Pepsi brings dead ancestors back to life.”

FALSE FRIENDS

       It’s easy to be fooled by Portenglish Anglicism. You cannot play baske or volley; the sports are basketball and volleyball. Outdoor means outside in English; big advertisements on the street are billboards. You don’t go to a shopping, but to a mall. Other nationalities have this problem, too. Italian speakers get confused with Britalian: slip is an old-fashioned English word for a lady’s under-garment, not boy’s underpants. George Pullman gave his name to the sleeping compartments for trains, not to buses. A showman, once people on TV are presenters or hosts. The French love investing nouns. Un parking is a car park, un relooking a makeover, un déstockage a clearance sale. These are not English, but Franglais.

CONFUSING MIXTURES

       US immigration has created many hybrids. Hispanic communities have producer dictionaries to help your suffer the web, deletear a document and vacuumear you carpet. There’s even a Hollywood film called Spanglish.

       The Dutch learn English in elementary school and watch undubbed films. Yet even they make mistakes. “That can instead of “That’s possible.” “I hate you welcome” for “I welcome you.” A Dutch prime minister confused undertaker with entrepreneur. The University of Delft awards a large sausage for the worst Dunglish errors. (“Worst” is Dutch for sausage.)

NEW ENGLISHES

Linguists speak of New Englishes: the healthy diversity of world English. But, as the pressure to learn English grows, these half-baked versions are proliferating. Computers can’t learn for us – not yet. With untrust worthy translation engines, dodgy internet courses, and troublesame false friends, the monolingual dream still sounds like babble of Babel.

The Tower of Babel Genesis, Charpter 11

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech…And they said, Let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven…And the Lord said, Behold, the people have all one language; and now nothing will be restrained from them. Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; confound the language of all the earth.

THE RED HAT SOCIETY

Language Level: Advanced

Source: SPEAK UP

Standard: British Accent

Girls Just Want to Have Fun

THE RED HAT SOCIETY

     When Sue Ellen Cooper was passing a charity shop in Tucson, Arizona, one Day is 1998, she bought a bright red fedora hat, for no other reason than it was cheap and, she thought, quite dashing. A couple of years later she came across the poem “Warning” by Jenny Joseph, which begins: “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple, With a red hat that doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me. At that point she decided that she would give all her friends bright red hats when they reached the age of 50.

     What started out as a bit of fun and frivolity for ladies has taken the world by storm and the Red Hat Society now has 1.5 million members worldwide. But while wearing a red hat may just be a bit of fun in the States, it used to mean something quite different in the UK, as Judy Brown, known as “Queen Wren Ruby Judy” to her chums in the “Belles aux Chapeaux Rouges” chapter in Blackpool, explains:

Judy Brown

(Northern English accent)

     Traditionally, nice ladies do not wear red hats, and certainly in England, they don’t wear red hats.

     Traditionally, women, “red hat, no knickers,” you see, it was ladies of the night, really, but now, Americans didn’t realise that, they just thought it was fun because people just don’t wear red hats.

A BAD NAME…

     The wearing of red hats is no longer the sole right of “ladies of the night” or prostitutes. Indeed the women of the Red Hat Society are respectable older ladies who are seeking “friendship and fun.” The society has its own hierarchy. Members in their 40s are either lavender or pink red-hatters, while “graduation" – a variation on “graduation” – comes at the age of 50.

     Judy Brown thinks that many members are discovering how to have fun for the first time:

     Judy Brown:

     So many women of our age always feel you have to do something for a reason, not just to go and have fun. I think men haven’t got that. Men can do something just for fun, women very rarely do that. You know, they actually don’t do anything for fun, there’s always, “Oh well, I’ve got to do the shopping on the way home” or something like that. Just to go and have fun, dress up, you know, wear a feather boa during the day, put a big red hat on and go forth and have fun with your friends and laugh and then go home again.

POST-FEMINIST?

Yet Judy thinks that the Red Hat Society actually has a more serious role to play:

Judy Brown

It’s done more than, I think, all the feminist movement did, in one sense, because women are friends wherever you are, and the emails I get, oh, my goodness me! it’s just one man’s work keeping up with everything.

No Rules (no sound available)

The Red Hat Society was founded by Sue Ellen Cooper, its “Exalted Queen Mother.”It is a “disorganization” with no fixed rules because, says the Exalted Queen Mother, “Most of us are really tired of rules.” Actually there is one rule: you need to be female and 50 in order to join. Women under 50 can become “pink hatters.” For more info, visit: www.redhatsociety.com

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FAMILY ALBUM PART XIX

Source: Family Album USA

Quiz 1

Past and Past participle quiz 1

Source: ENGLISH PRACTICE

Do the lesson and comment with answers, please. 

Fill in the blanks with the past and past participle of the words given in brackets.

1. The sailors ——————— to the broken mast, as the ship ———————-. (cling, sink)

2. They ——————- a deep well, but ——————- no water. (dig, find)

3. The snake —————— around the boy’s hand, but he ——————— it away. (wind, fling)

4. When the bell was ———————, the runners ——————– to their feet. (ring, spring)

5. As he ——————– the axe, it fell from his hands and his toe was ———————– in two. (swing, cleave)

6. The book —————— from my knee to the floor. (slide)

7. The wind —————— the leaves. (stir)

8. He —————— his hands in his pockets. (stick)

9. He —————– the ladder against the wall. (stand)

10. Malaria is a deadly disease —————— by mosquitoes. (spread)

11. There never has —————— a great man who has not been misunderstood. (arise)

12. Adam and his wife —————— themselves from the presence of the Lord God. (hide)

13. She was so angry that she ——————– the letter into pieces. (tear)

14. The boy who had ———————- the watch was arrested. (steal)