​Words! Words! Words! 2: Claptrap and boob-tubes Alliteration: The Sequel
 
Welcome back! In our previous blog, we wondered where all those words in English come from and we explored the linguistic phenomenon present in many children’s rhymes:
 
Georgy Porgy came out to play               Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
Jack and Jill went up the hill                     Eeny meeny miny moh
Hickory dickory dock                        Incy wincy spider climbed up the waterspout
 
We saw that this taste for playing with sounds by repeating syllables, vowel sounds and/or consonants within and among words are clever uses of the technique known as ‘alliteration’. The word is derived from the Latin word ‘latira’, meaning ‘the letters of the alphabet’ and examples have been around a long time. Shakespeare, for example, loved using it:
 
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life
(Romeo and Juliet)
 
And nowadays we see it everywhere, especially in the world of commerce and advertising:

Dunkin’ Donuts       PayPal        Coca-Cola      The Horse and Hound (pub) 

Many of these words are compounds, where the second part repeats a sound in the first part. So we saw, for example, that a room that is in a mess can be topsy-turvy. Or a person who is decidedly old-fashioned can describe themselves as being a bit of a fuddy-duddy. And work that is boring and routine, with no creativity, can be described as humdrum.

Over to you
 
1          Here are a few endings of such compounds: do you know or can you                    guess what the first part might be? Don’t peek at the answers below!
 
 
             beaver       toity       hop            zag           knack       chat
 
              trap           tube       weensy      wig           jeebies      bub 
 
Cover the text below this line – don’t look at the answers yet!
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
2          So here are the answers: do you know what they mean and how they’re               used? Use a dictionary to check.
 
  eager beaver       hoity-toity      hip-hop    zig-zag      knick-knack    chitchat     
 
    claptrap    boob-tube       teeny-weensy     bigwig      heebie-jeebies   
 
                                               hubbub
 
Here are some more concepts. Each blank can be filled by an alliterative compound from the box above.
a.         A bit arrogant and haughty; someone who thinks they are better or more            important than others The __________ girl walked by with her Prada bag             and her nose in the air.
b.         Small, tiny. She looked great in this __________ black dress.
c.         The kind of rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rap.
d.         To move in a direction that has sharp alternate left and right changes in                direction
e.        A small, almost worthless object, often a souvenir or an ornament. The                shelf was covered with ornaments and useless ____________.
f.         An important, influential person in an institution or community. We went to             a meeting addressed by lots of local __________.
g.         A state of nervous fear or anxiety. It takes more than a poltergeist to give             me the ______________.   
h.       Friendly conversation about things that aren’t very important. What did you            talk about? Oh, nothing really. Just ______________.
i.         A loud confused noise, caused by many voices. After the dramatic                       announcement, I tried to make myself heard above the _______________
j.         A tight piece of women’s clothing that covers the chest but not the                        shoulders. _______________
k.       Words or ideas that may sound serious but are really foolish, empty or                 stupid. Sometimes politicians talk a load of ____________________
l           Someone who is extremely enthusiastic and enjoys working very hard.              The new teacher works very hard: she comes to school early and leaves               very late. She’s a real ________________
 
 Consolidation
 
A       Fill in the gaps
 
1. Seeing a cockroach, even on the TV, always gives me the heebie-_______                        
2. He’s a really keen student – an eager __________ if ever I saw one!
 
3. I like Afro-American music, especially hip- __________
 
4. Are you angry? No? Not even a teensy __________ bit?
 
5. It doesn’t surprise me the police stopped his car – it was zig __________ all         over the place.
 
6. When I’m on holiday I always like to buy some local knick-________ as               presents for people back home.
 
7. Don’t believe a word of what he says – it’s just a load of clap_______.
 
8. We were invited to a lunch with local big _______
 
9.  Women often wear a boob _______ with a strapless dress.
 
10. Oh, we weren’t talking about anything serious – just a bit of chit_______.
 
11. We have had enough of her hoity-_____ manner
 
12. I could hardly hear myself speak above all the hub­­________ in the theatre           bar.
 
 
B       Discuss with your partner(s)
 
 
1   What gives you the heebie-jeebies? Is there a place or building near you that       gives you the heebie-jeebies?
 
2  Do you like hip-hop? Why? / Why not?
 
3   Do you buy knick-knacks as souvenirs or presents when you go on holiday?        Never? Always? Sometimes…..?
 
4   Do you personally know any local bigwigs? If so, what are they like? Are they      a bit hoity-toity? Full of claptrap?
 
5   At work, are you an eager beaver?
 
 
I hope you’re working wonderfully, living lavishly and feeling fulfilled!
 
Ta-ra!
 
Alan
 
Copyright Alan Marsh 2016

Words! Words! Words! 1: Topsy-turvy riffraff
Do you know how many words there are in English? Well, it depends on what you count (and what you don’t) but most commentators agree on a number somewhere around the million mark.
Phew, that’s quite a lot! But don’t worry, as it’s estimated that most educated native speakers have a lexicon (the number of words they know) of about twenty thousand words. And to survive in English, you probably need a basic lexicon of about two thousand words.
But where do all these words come from? Well, from a variety of sources, including words from other languages, but we’ll look at these in future blogs. This month we’ll have a look at a special kind of word that seems to be made up ‘out of the blue’ but actually often comes from the human taste for playing with words. After all, isn’t that the basis of most of literature, especially of poetry - and now that Bob Dylan’s been awarded the Nobel Prix for Literature, perhaps we can add song lyrics too.
Rhymes and rhythms
Children, of course, love playing with words: here are a couple of excerpts from children’s rhymes in English:
Georgy Porgy came out to play                     Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
Jack and Jill went up the hill                           Eeny meeny miny moh
Hickery dickory dock                                     Incy wincy spider climbed up the waterspout
You’ll probably know some or all of these rhymes, and if you don’t, try googling them to find out how they continue. Ah, googling, another new word!
These examples of this playful propensity for repeating syllables, vowel sounds and/or consonants within and among words are clever uses of the technique known as ‘alliteration’. The word is derived from the Latin word ‘latira’, meaning ‘the letters of the alphabet’ and examples have been around a long time. Perhaps the first recorded instance in English is the great eighth-century Anglo-Saxon poem Beowolf:
Hot-hearted Beowulf was bent upon battle
 
Here’s Shakespeare playing with alliteration in Romeo and Juliet:
 
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life
 
Can you see and hear the repetition of the sound ‘f’ and’s’? The effect is to give the lines a musical rhythm, which becomes an almost hypnotic rhythm, in fact, in Samuel Taylor’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
 
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
 
 
Catchy and cool
But it’s not only in poetry that we find alliteration: it’s all around us. Alliteration helps to make a name catchy and memorable and many famous actors are known by names that are alliterative (and many were made up): Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, Ronald Reagan, Robert Redford, Nick Nolte and Silvester Stallone, to name just a few.
 
Because alliteration helps to make words memorable, we see examples in advertising slogans everywhere:
 
You'll never put a better bit of butter on your knife. (advertising slogan for Country Life butter)
The daily diary of the American dream. (a slogan of The Wall Street Journal)
 
And of course brand names abound (there we go again!):
Dunkin’ Donuts       PayPal        Coca-Cola      The Horse and Hound (pub)       
Testing times with teenagers
What I find particularly interesting is that this playful ploy is carried on into adulthood and there are many expressions, adjectives, adverbs and nouns which use this feature of English, especially in informal, everyday English. By the way, apart from the highlighted examples, this article is littered with alliteration (get it?). Have you noticed any? We actually use them quite frequently, often without even realising we’re doing it! Can you see any in this (slightly contrived) transcript of a conversation I had with my teenage daughter some time ago? Clue: there are three.
Alan: Amy, you’re room’s such a mess!
Amy: What do you mean?
Alan: Look, everything’s topsy-turvy. Your clothes are all over the floor and those in the drawers are just chucked in higgledy-piggledy, with no rhyme or reason.
Amy: [Censored!!!!!]

Over to you
1          Many of these expressions are compounds, where the second part repeats a sound in the first part. Here are a few endings of such compounds: do you know or can you guess what the first part might be? Don’t peek at the answers below!
 
bustle           drum              jumbo          hush      raff         nilly      
 
turvy                    duddy            panky                    dally      piggledy
 

 
2          So here are the answers: do you know what they mean and how they’re               used?
hustle and bustle           humdrum     mumbo-jumbo      hush-hush    riffraff
willy-nilly     topsy-turvy    fuddy-duddy      hanky-panky  
dilly-dally   higgledy-piggledy
 

3          Now try this exercise for clarification:
Fill in the gaps (without looking back!)
1. The books were stacked higgledy- __________ on the shelves.
2. She doesn’t like the countryside because she misses the hustle and __________ of the big city
3. The whole affair was very hush __________ - no-one knew about it until it was over
4. The government's topsy-_______ priorities mean that spending on education remains low.  
5. There was a bit of hanky-­­­_______ going on at the Christmas party.
6. She warned her son to keep away from such riff­­­_______.
7. Don't dilly-____ - just get your things and let's go!
8. They think I'm an old fuddy-________ because I don't approve of tattoos.
9. You don’t believe in horoscopes and all that mumbo­________, do you?
10 Most of the work is fairly hum­­_______
11 Don’t use your credit card willy-_______
If you’re still not sure about the meanings, look them up on any dictionary website.

4    Finally, think about these questions: what would your answers be? Better still, why not discuss them with a colleague?
1.      Is any room in your house often topsy-turvy?     
2.      Do you like the hustle and bustle of big cities? Or do you prefer a slower              pace of life? 
3       Would you say there’s a lot of riff-raff in the area you live in?
4       Do you dilly-dally before making a decision?
5       Would you say you’re a bit of a fuddy-duddy?
 6      Is your work fairly humdrum? Or is there quite a bit of variety?
 
We’ll look at a few more of these in our next blog. Until then, stay serene, keep cool, take your time and while away your time with lovely alliterative language!
Toodle-oo!
Alan
Copyright Alan Marsh 2016

​

In my previous blog, I saluted Nelson Mandela and wished him peace, using the Maltese words sliem ghalik. As I write this, Mandela is receiving tributes from around the world, mainly for his achievements in helping to end apartheid and in delivering his country from the brink of civil war. He will be remembered and honoured for making reconciliation, forgiveness and social justice the central themes of his political career.

He wasn't always such an icon, of course. There was a time when certain governments in the west were quite happy that Mandela was in jail, and in many ways they explicitly or implicitly supported the apartheid South African government. Otherwise, how else could the government in Pretoria have kept him imprisoned for 27 years?

Mandela was a resistance fighter, let us remember. He and the African National Congress resisted a government who would not embrace democratic principles. Sometimes that resistance included armed struggle. The British newspaper The Independent of 8th December 2013 reminds us:

An opinion article in the Daily Mail on the day of the concert to mark Mandela's 70th birthday in 1988 encapsulated their views [of certain MPs in the British Conservative Party]: "The ANC and its leader Nelson Mandela have no more claim to be saints or heroes than do the Provisional IRA with their lynch mobs and car bombers." In the mid-1980s, Thatcher herself had described the African National Congress as a "typical terrorist organisation" and – in defiance of many among the black South African opposition –refused to apply more than minimal sanctions against apartheid.

How is this relevant to English Language Teaching, you may wonder? Well, consider these topics: how many of them ever appear in our coursebooks?

Multinationals: are they criminal organisations?
Democracy: is it democratic?
Social media: how have they changed the way people protest?
Women's Day: How men keep women in their place
My school education: why it doesn't/didn't work - and how to make it better
Terrorists or freedom fighters: is it ever legitimate to take up an armed struggle?
Fashion: is it murdering women?
My country: the worst things about it - and how to make it better

Of course they don't appear in coursebooks. Nor, as a general rule,  do pictures of same-sex couples, people with disabilities, or homeless people. Publishers need to keep things generally bland and to avoid offending sensibilities - otherwise, they argue, their books and materials won't be adopted by schools, regions or entire countries.

But just now and again don't you get the feeling that your students would really like to get their teeth into something controversial, less middle of-the-road - and just possibly related to the things they might be concerned about outside the classroom, concerns they address and are confronted with in their everyday lives? Why not ask them?

If this sounds intriguing to you. and you are interested in giving space to learners' voices in areas of social criticism, check out this e-book by Lindsay Clandfield and Luke Meddings:
52: a year of subversive activity for the ELT classroom
You can sample it on The Round website and if you want to buy it (it's just a few euros) you can get it from Smashwords (you just need to register and call up the book) or go to
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/133783

As the authors say, however, be warned: you may be shocked and you may find some of this material shocking. There will be learners and classes you can't use this with. But how refreshing if you can.

Nelson Mandela was a champion of peace and reconciliation, true. But he also resisted oppression and was ready to die for his principles. Should we banish such topics from the ELT classroom? Or can we and should we give a voice to our learners to engage with concepts of social awareness, inclusiveness and social justice amongst our learners?

A few days off now. And so I went off for my usual walk/jog - a bit of one, a bit of the other, but not always easy to spot the difference. The route takes me past Selmun (in the north of Malta) and the views are stunning, especially when the sun comes out after several days rain and Malta looks green again. Lovely hues of green and blue. Really exhilarating. And as I passed an elderly man he looked up at me, smiled and nodded and said 'Sliem ghalik' (the 'gh' is silent). Nobody has ever said that to me here in Malta. It's usually 'Bongu' (good morning') but this was 'Peace to you' and perhaps also 'I salute you' (the Maltese version of the Catholic prayer 'Hail Mary' begins with 'Sliema ghalik, Marija). So perhaps a mixture of both. Common in Arabic as As-salam alaykum (السلام عليكم) And I thought, goodness, I'd like to say that to somebody, sometime. It's so beautiful, and so unusual. Perhaps archaic, I'm not sure.

But the morning had begun sadly. Switching on the telly, Nelson Mandela. I remember marching in the streets of London and chanting, Free, free Nelson Mandela!' And dancing to a song of the same name (was that The Special AKA?). And that profoundly moving moment when Madiba was at last freed, and Apartheid belonged to the past. For many of us he was a role model. He showed that it IS possible to make a better world, through our actions and commitments.

And so, there you go. I can say it. Madiba, we hail you and may peace be with you. Sliem ghalik.