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Your daily dose of English, now in a handy (get it?) app
Digital technology and the internet as a whole is not one of Germany’s strong suits. This starts in schools, where the current pandemic only highlights this predicament: when schools first had to close, all of a sudden everybody was forced to use computers to learn. Unfortunately, schools were not prepared and in many cases the…
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Weekly Poem: Scheherazade
I stumbled upon Richard Siken’s poem Scheherazade by chance and it has quickly become one of my favorite poems. Despite the straightforward language being used, it is a challenging poem as it isn’t immediately clear what is being conveyed. The poem has a certain surreal quality to it that is very similar to how we…
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Idiom of the Week: A fly on the wall
Invisibility is a super power many people have daydreamed about. IGN ranks it as the second best super power – just after the ability to fly – and it is easy to see why this ability is so sought after. It would allow you to find out what people really think about you, or how…
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Idiom of the Week: Dark horse
Since last week we talked about elephants in rooms being ignored, we decided that this week’s idiom should also be animal-related. This time, the subject is the expression dark horse. This concept is used in different contexts, particularly in politics, although the term originated from horse racing. In that particular context, a dark horse was…
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J. K. Rowling: Faux-Pas or Transphobia?
On 6 June 2020, J.K. Rowling publicly commented on an article entitled “Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate.”. She tweeted “‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” thus obviously defining women by their menstruation. Is this…
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Weekly Poem: Because I could not stop for Death
Because I could not stop for Death—He kindly stopped for me—The Carriage held but just Ourselves—And Immortality. We slowly drove—He knew no haste,And I had put awayMy labor and my leisure too,For His Civility— We passed the School, where Children stroveAt recess—in the ring—We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—We passed the Setting Sun— Or…
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Idiom of the Week: the elephant in the room
Animals stuck in rooms are apparently a great source for idioms. Remember our post about there being „no room to swing a cat„? Today we will finally address the elephant in the room. Parts of this idiom are fairly straightforward. It is easy to imagine a standard living room, and it is easy to imagine…
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Weekly Poem: This living hand, now warm and capable
This living hand, now warm and capableBy John Keats This living hand, now warm and capableOf earnest grasping, would, if it were coldAnd in the icy silence of the tomb,So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nightsThat thou would wish thine own heart dry of bloodSo in my veins red life might stream again,And…
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Carol Rose GoldenEagle’s Bone Black
Wren StrongEagle, an Indigenous artist with a thriving pottery business and a loving husband, lives in Qu’Apelle, Saskatchewan. She falls into depression after miscarrying her baby, also triggering her to truly process the past in which she was abused. Her twin sister, Raven, comes to visit her from Calgary, where she works as a lawyer.…
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1066: the Norman Conquest, bury your fury for the English language
When you first started learning English, you may have struggled with some patterns. You may have realised that there are a good number of words that are not pronounced the way you expected, in fact, there are words that are spelled virtually identically, yet pronounced differently. Why are the words fury and bury pronounced so…