Latest news with #vocabulary
New York Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Two New Picture Books About the Transformative Power of Language
'On a mild autumn morning, Oscar was doing his daily digging when he discovered a magnificent wooden chest.' Does this opening sentence raise questions in the mind of an adult reader? It certainly does. But even if you pause briefly to ask why Oscar digs every day — and whether child protective services should be alerted — the attractive picture book A CHEST FULL OF WORDS (NorthSouth, 48 pp., $19.95, ages 4 to 8), by the frequent collaborators Rebecca Gugger and Simon Röthlisberger, soon sweeps you along. Because what Oscar finds in this long-buried chest is a tangled treasure of words — and they are, intriguingly, quite fancy words at that, such as bulbous, docile and featherlight. Wow. As Oscar begins to apply these adjectives to objects in his vicinity, the reader stops asking pitiful irrelevant questions and falls into the habit of pointing at an illustration and matching it to a single delightfully descriptive word. 'That lighthouse is fuchsia,' you say proudly. 'And that bear is winged.' If I were to apply adjectives to Oscar, I would describe him as practical and perhaps worryingly-adept-with-tools, but also, crucially, teachable. When he opens the chest, he is at first disappointed, as he had hoped for something cool, like a slice of pink cake or a diamond. Attempting to make the best of the situation, he extracts the word fluorescent and tries playing with it, but it's no fun at all, so he airily tosses it into a shrub and walks off. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The 97th Scripps National Spelling Bee
Cyleane Equra Ama Quansah, 11, of Accra, Ghana, spells her word in the preliminaries. Sixty spellers were eliminated in Tuesday's early spelling and vocabulary rounds, leaving 183 to take a written spelling and vocabulary test ahead of Wednesday's quarter-finals. Photograph:Raian Timur, 10, of Greenwood, Indiana, yawns while awaiting his turn in the preliminaries. Photograph:A participant studies for the National Spelling Bee at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center. Photograph: TheTarini Handakumar, 14, of Austin, Texas, spells her word during the preliminaries. Photograph:Aurora Ottilie Spisak, 14, of Dayton, Ohio dances during a commercial break during Tuesday's preliminaries. Photograph:Zwe Sunyata Spacetime, 13, of Washington DC, spells his word in the preliminaries. Photograph:Zachary Luke Milallos Rara, 13, of Louisville, Kentucky, spells his word in the preliminaries. Photograph:Beatriz Lucille Whitford-Rodriguez, 14, of Chicago, reacts after successfully spelling her word in the quarter-finals. Photograph:The elite field of 243 spellers from all over the globe was narrowed down to 57 semi-finalists following the preliminary and quarter-final rounds. Photograph:Isaac Gabriel Cancio, 14, of Corpus Christi, Texas, hugs his family after making it into the semi-finals. Photograph:Aishwarya Kallakuri, 14, of Charlotte, North Carolina, spells her word in Wednesday's semi-finals. Photograph:Hannah Kuo, 12, of San Bernardino, California's family cheers after she correctly spells her word in the semi-finals. Photograph:Sarv Shailesh Dharavane, 11, of Tucker, Georgia, reacts after successfully spelling his word in the semi-finals. He is one of nine spellers who advanced to compete in Thursday's final round. Photograph:
Daily Mail
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Amorous Or Loving? by Rupert Gavin: Who really invented Twitter? A) Jack Dorsey B) Jeff Bezoz C) Geoffrey Chaucer D) Elon Musk E) Mark Zuckerberg
Amorous Or Loving? by Rupert Gavin (Unicorn £25, 224pp) Spoken today by 1.6billion souls, English is a mongrel language, words flung together down the millennia from Latin (Saturday, amorous), Anglo-Saxon (writing, laughter, riddle, ask), Norse (slaughter, berserk, fog, mire) and Norman French (park, beef, govern, duke, commence). In more recent epochs, Native Americans gave us skunk and moose. Hindus provided bungalow, chintz and juggernaut. It is Rupert Gavin's contention, in this properly scholarly yet highly accessible study, that our language evolved and came about through invasion and conquest. The Romans, Vikings and Normans were 'all attracted by the relative wealth of these islands', exploiting the natives and bequeathing vocabulary. The Romans were here for 400 years, leaving behind roads, cities, fortifications – and their Latin continued to be used in religious services and on legal documents for centuries. The first court case was not conducted in English until 1363. Meanwhile, the Vikings were busy sacking holy places, preying upon the weak and the helpless, raping and pillaging generally. Ravens learned to follow their armies, aware there'd be plenty of dead bodies to feast upon. From this period, English developed many words for arrows, bows, archers and fletchers. The Norsemen were 'the stuff of collective nightmares', and there were still hundreds of years to go until the Normans turned up – enough time for an anonymous scribe to set down the 3,182 alliterative Anglo-Saxon or Old English lines of Beowulf. Talk about collective nightmares. Back in the Eighties, when I sat my Finals, I had to translate and memorise the nonsense. It's all about heroic deeds, gods and monsters, and much influenced Tolkien, let alone nerdy teens devoted to Game Of Thrones. Gavin gives us plenty of information about battles, assemblies, treaties and 'inter-tribal squabbling', each mob babbling away in Kentish, Mercian and Northumbrian dialects. When he says, 'the position of women merits consideration', he must be conjectural, as nothing much was said about them, save praise for embroidery skills. My theory is that, as their names were unpronounceable and impossible to spell – Aethelwynn, Aethelflaed, Eadburgh, Leoba and Berhtgyth – it was easier to ignore them altogether. I hadn't realised the Normans were such immense brutes, starting with William's arrival at Hastings in 1066. Anglo-Saxon lords were killed, their families stripped of lands. Castles went up, to oppress the population. Executions, branding and the severing of noses were common punishments. Nevertheless, in the credit column, London was developed, to concentrate 'our language and culture' in a single place. The Normans also had a mania for building cathedrals, which ultimately gave jobs to little old ladies to work in the gift shops. Though Gavin has an interesting chapter on Chaucer – who in 1389 deployed 2,000 new English words in The Canterbury Tales, including twitter, femininity, narcotic, erect and plumage – his chief interest is in the industrious translations of the Bible. Wycliffe in 1384 brought in the words excellent, problem, ambitious and wrinkle, as well as graven image, keys of the kingdom and root of all evil. Tyndale, a century and a half later, gave us coat of many colours, eye for an eye, suffer fools gladly and the skin of my teeth. Behind these enlightened tasks of translation lay much bloodshed, the whole Catholic-Protestant divide and the upheaval of the Reformation. Theologians and politicians, such as Sir Thomas More, were for some reason dead against 'making the scriptures intelligible to the common man'. Possessing a Bible in English rather than ornate, ritualistic Latin was a heresy punishable by death. Thomas Cranmer, for example, was burnt at the stake – yet the simple beauty of his Book of Common Prayer, dating from 1549, was to last for more than 400 years, until shamefully replaced by the ugly nonsense of the Alternative Services pamphlet. When I wanted the old-style liturgy used at my father's funeral, the trendy vicar said, 'Oh, these days people prefer a chorus from The Lion King.' In 1611, the King James Bible was published. Fifty scholars had been kept busy for seven years, 'agonising over the original texts', the Hebrew and the Greek. There was a hysterical misprint in an early edition: 'Thou shalt commit adultery.' They'd missed out the 'not'. Gavin is correct to say that the Authorised Version, as it became known, was English at its most 'poetic, vivid, direct, rhythmic, fluent'. It is a crime that it has fallen into disuse – and perhaps no surprise that churches are empty. Gavin omits to mention a fascinating puzzle. In Psalm 46, the 46th word from the start is 'shake' and the 46th word from the end is 'spear'. In 1611, Shakespeare was 46. Spooky – and did Shakespeare have a hand in the enterprise, polishing the text, I wonder? Apart from the pulpit, what Gavin calls the other 'prime user of language' was the theatre. Hence a marvellous discussion of Shakespeare, who used 31,534 different words, coining 2,000 new ones, such as bedroom, barefaced, dewdrops and leapfrog. He is matched in ingenuity only by Dickens, who invented 1,600 words, including flummox, dustbin and fairy story. Wondering how 'a single language would create a single and unifying identity', Gavin explains that mass printing and education made works accessible, and made English 'increasingly uniform across the nation', regularising spelling, ironing out regional accents and dialects. Don't get me started on Welsh, brought in during my lifetime by Welsh nationalists to cut my native Wales off. Finally, we must not underestimate how English was spread around the world by our 'military prowess, maritime power, mercantile strength and industrial development', ie by our colonial expansion, which made Britain globally pre-eminent, the map painted patriotic pink. People are meant to feel guilty about all this. I don't myself. Gavin must follow up this first-class book with others on the compilation of dictionaries, the mysteries of pronunciation, the uses of slang and swearing, the power of jokes and wordplay, the censoriousness of wokery, and finally the language of the internet, where words are fast disappearing in a blizzard of acronyms and emojis. Who needs literacy (and literature) now?
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
OHS junior places 3rd in UIL Spelling and Vocabulary contest
May 22—Shijay Sivakumar, the middle school spelling whiz who made the Scripps National Spelling Bee, is now at Odessa High School and placed third in the state UIL Spelling and Vocabulary contest earlier this week in Austin. Javier Ruiz, who teaches English 4 (seniors) and coaches Academic Decathlon and UIL Spelling at OHS, said Sivakumar is an amazing young man. "He handles his rigorous school load plus devotes time to band and UIL. He is very talented! I hope we get to work together again next year!" Ruiz said. This was Sivakumar's first time making state in the contest and he said his spelling bee preparation in middle school helped him get there. "It was just something for me to ... exercise my interest with spelling," said Sivakumar, now 17. He added that he didn't know about the UIL Spelling and Vocabulary contest previously. "But through high school, I just found out about it, and I started competing," Sivakumar said. According to the UIL website, each year, the UIL Spelling and Vocabulary Contest is based on a different vocabulary list provided by UIL and consists of a three-part test. Part I: A fifteen-minute section of 30 multiple-choice items focused on vocabulary and proofreading. Part II and III: The hand-written spelling of 70 words pronounced aloud to contestants, as well as a tiebreaker section of 20 additional pronounced words, the site detailed. Sivakumar, who will be a senior next year, added that he is pleased with how he did. He added that Ruiz helped him and set everything up. "He told me that he hadn't gone to state in 20 years doing this, and no one ever from the school has made state. So I told myself, okay, I'm going to be the first. And I told myself, I was going to put OHS on the map and do it for him, try and make state, and I did that, so I'm glad, and I also medaled at state, so I'm pretty satisfied," Sivakumar said. Sivakumar is in the International Baccalaureate program at OHS. "I love the IB program. Actually, my friends, we've all gotten super close through the IB program, all of us having the same classes together. ... I couldn't do it without ... my friends and teachers. They've been my biggest supporters throughout everything this year," he added. He said preparing for these contests teaches you a lot of discipline and work ethic. He could try the contest again next year, but he's not sure if he'll have the time with all his IB exams. "I'm going to ponder it (and) see if I have the time to do it before making a decision on that," Sivakumar said. The competition was held at UT Austin and he had a really good time touring the campus so he hopes to go there, Harvard or Brown in no particular order. His sister Shreeya, an eighth grader at the Young Women's Leadership Academy, will be competing in the Scripps bee next week in Washington, D.C. The competition starts May 27. Sivakumar wanted to make a shout-out to her, sending his support and hoping she does "the best she can." He also thanked Ruiz. "He's been ... a big help with all the travel and logistics. I'm glad I was able to make state for him, and I wanted to shout out the IB program. They've helped me so much. My friends and teachers, honestly, I couldn't do any of this without them. (I'm) just so blessed to have all of them in my life," Sivakumar said.
Times
16-05-2025
- Times
A saucy French recipe made us go the full ‘monter'
Like linguistic magpies, we English-speakers pick up pleasing and useful words from around the world, as well as from the invaders who used to turn up here every few hundred years, and it has given us the biggest vocabulary in the world. How do others get by with fewer words? Do they make up for it with more inventive use of idiom and nuance? We like to think not — indeed our word 'run' has 645 meanings on its own — but I was impressed by the variety of uses to which the French put monter, according to the Collins-Robert dictionary. Monter à Paris can mean, it says, to go up to Paris, to go to work in Paris or to move to Paris,
