Nanjing isn’t an English verb. It probably never will be.
Like Darjeeling or Wyoming, our brains probably have to work hard to stop thinking of these proper nouns as verbs. That “ing” ending is a red herring we all know better than to actually hear.
Shanghai, of course, is a verb. It’s a bit like “press-ganged”. If you’ve forgotten the meaning, go and check out the Charlie Chaplin film ‘Shanghaied’.
Japan is an English verb as well. If an object is japanned, it has been finished with a thick shiny lacquer;...
Dressing up schoolwork as a toy. It’s such a hoary old cliché it might just work.
I’m hoping to coax out some actual written words from my students by inviting them to play with the paper itself; dirty it up a little for display purposes.
Harper Lee herself describes it as a “filthy piece of paper”, the note that two children try to post through the broken slats of the Boo Radley house, “Boo” being the nickname of the mysterious recluse in To Kill a Mockingbird.
If successfully coaxed, my students will...
The term, “flatscreen TV”, continues to be used in 2023. I sometimes wonder why. Seems to denote value, luxury, modernity. “Police seized 15 stolen flatscreen television sets”; “The room features a mini-bar and flatscreen TV”.
It’s actually been impossible to buy a new TV which isn’t flat for at least 15 years, making the “flatscreen” preface useless. Yet it persists.
There’s a name for this; “redundancy”.
Other examples include “each and every”, “balsa wood” or “cease and desist”.
Like bad handwriting, these are perpetrated more often by first language users, because they rely...
“Thank you for your tea.”
“I just tried it.”
“It has a very good taste and smell.”
As a proper tea nut, this is the kind of WeChat message I’m used to sending and receiving.
But this was odd. I hadn’t given any tea to my colleague’s girlfriend. So her message made no sense.
Then I remembered. Yes, I had given them some curry leaves earlier in the week.
With the huge minimum order of curry leaves purchasable on Taobao, I had given half to the only other person I know nearby who loves Indian...
