As most of you are aware, this last Wednesday was Back to the Future Day. The day that they visited when they went into the future, Oct 21, 2015. Hard to believe it has been 30 years..... I thought it was interesting that one of my professors brought this fact up just before a visiting professor gave a presentation on his research. Since the discipline of applied linguistics is fairly new, only 70 years or so, she had us think back over the last 30 years in our field and the progress that has been made. (After of course we thought about the movie and how many of the things are in our life that the movie had projected. Most, actually do exist, but not to the frequency they had suggested.) After the guest speaker was done and we discussed his research and findings, the thought was to project where we might go in the next thirty years. What difference are we going to make in the field? It is a good reflection no matter what your field to think back over your life and see how far you've come, and then decide where you want to be going. Most importantly, doing something to make it happen! I think we all need to do a little going back to the future.
My list of British vs American usages of words keeps growing. If you haven't checked it out, it is the Say what? page. The hardest ones for me to actually remember are the musical terms. The British terms come from the renaissance period (pronounced with the stress on the second syllable with more of a long a sound renAYssance), where the American terms are from translation of the German terms which are more widely used throughout the world... So here is your quick British music lesson:
breve - double note
semibreve - whole note
minim - half note
crotchet - quarter note
quaver - eighth note
semiquaver - sixteenth note
demisemiquaver - thirty second note
To add to my fun in choir, the warm ups involve words that are British as well. So warming up on scales we sing things like red lorry, yellow lorry very fast up and down. It's a diction thing....
I have learnt that the small dot at the end of the sentence is a full stop. Even when arguing and they are making a point they say full stop, where we would say period. So like, "The answer is no - period!" would be "the answer is no - full stop!" Also, the last letter of the alphabet is zed, and the "h" is "haych". Dish soap is washing up liquid, cream cheese is soft cheese and the list goes on. It still takes me a while in the grocery store when trying to find ingredients for my recipes. Some of it doesn't exist here, like spaghetti squash; so sorry Chris, I can't cook your favorites. :( I asked where to buy white out the other day. It's called Tipp-ex. So I still have adventures daily.
In my grammar seminar we were discussing "verbing". That's where a noun becomes a verb in usages. Most body parts have been verbed i.e. elbowed, nosed, eyed. Google has been verbed when we say go and google that. The word verbing in it's use is doing just that! So we were asked to think of words that have been verbed. As we were discussing what we had come up with, one of the guys in the class suggested "trousered." I guess it is a term in London for taking something. So pocketing, (verbed) or the act of putting it in your trousers (your pocket). He looks at me and says, I guess in America you can call it pantsed. I looked over at a fellow classmate who is from the Caribbean, but lived in Florida, and we both started laughing. We informed him that it has a completely different connotation in the states. That the term to "pants" is to have someone pull your trousers down on you. (pants in Britain are underwear...)
My favorite of the week though was yesterday. I was checking out at the grocery store and when I finished my transaction I said what I always do to the clerk: "Don't work too hard", (or sometimes I say "try not to work too hard"). He stopped for a moment, maybe struggling to understand my american accent, then very genuinely said "Thank you, how very kind!" My job here is finished. ;)
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