Random Quote
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
---- Arnold Lobel
Don't knock the weather. If it didn't change once in a while, nine out of ten people couldn't start a conversation.
---- Kin Hubbard
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
---- Lily Tomlin
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
---- H. G. Wells
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
---- Pablo Picasso
The important thing is not to stop questioning.
---- Albert Einstein
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
---- Thomas A. Edison
Drink coffee! Do stupid things faster!
---- unknown
Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
---- Malcom Forbes
As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
---- M. Cartmill
This may be the most interesting blog theme I've ever seen. http://eflgeek.com/index.php Definitely in my top 5 at least.
---- Steve Dembo
It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.
---- Arnold Toynbee
Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.”
---- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749 -1832)
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.
---- Galileo Galilei
As soon as I buy the moose head, I have to go pick up some KY jelly.
---- Mary Roninette Kowal
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
---- Sheik Abd-al-Kadir
The voodoo priest and all his powders were as nothing compared to espresso, cappuccino, and mocha, which are stronger than all the religions of the world combined, and perhaps stronger than the human soul itself.
---- Mark Helprin, Memoir from Antproof Case, 1995
One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.
---- Edward Abbey
Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.
---- Abigail Adams (1744 - 1818)
Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.
---- Terry Pratchett
Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
---- J. Robert Oppenheimer
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
---- Evan Esar
Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.
---- Fred Allen
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
---- Robert Frost
"It was on my fifth birthday that Papa put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Remember, my son, if you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm.'"
---- Sam Levenson
Wronglish
Today I was having coffee with a friend and we started talking about Konglish, Japlish, Singlish and got onto how there should be one term to express this for all languages. We ended up with wronglish. Of course to refer to a specific variety of English you could refer to your local variation whatever that may be. I like wronglish better than Engrish which brings up visions of Japanese speakers mangling English. At least with Wronglish it covers everyone from Russians to Germans to Koreans to Japanese.
I did a ghit search and came up with only 903 results so this word is not exactly in common use yet. The number one search result was the Urban Dictionary and the definition is similar but not the same and dates back to 2003:
the language spoken by immigrants who have not bothered to learn the correct english language
everyone who shops at best buy speaks wronglish and i cant understand them
So what exactly is your favorite wronglish word or expression?
gordsellar wrote 274 words on Sunday Dec 30, 2007 at 02:31 PM
Yeah, I got into this conversation the other night with someone who was trying to convince me that Konglish is a dialect, that Koreans understand one another perfectly well when using it, and it’s just us silly Anglophones who don’t “understand.”
Which may have some limited truth in the context we were discussing, which was how “buzzwords” get used in advertising, but what I held back from saying, for politeness’ sake, was that you certainly don’t want your airplane handling manuals written in a “dialect” like Konglish or some other form of Wronglish.
Anyway, we’re not the only ones who don’t always understand Konglish. Students coping with someone who speaks English at a considerably lower level than themselves, or even a few years apart in age, seem (in my experience) to really have to struggle to summon up any kind of meaning from what’s said. Which explains why in these cases so many times students revert to Korean to figure out what the hell the lowest-level member of the group is saying.
I think Konglish is fun, but yeah, I agree, it’s Wronglish, if for no other reason than that it’s too inconsistent to be an actual “dialect” and too underused to be even a “creole”—it’s just English spoken poorly. (Which isn’t a moral judgment: the French spoke by almost in my hometown would be poorly-spoken French, similarly. Not a dialect of French. Just messed-up French.)
BTW I replied to your most recent comment. Have you got an installation of Moodle I could look at? Maybe we can talk about it sometime. Now that I’m all but done with the semester’s work, that is…