FUTURE: WILL (PREDICTIONS, BELIEFS, EXPECTATIONS)

FUTURE: GOING TO (PLANS AND INTENTIONS)

BRITISH SCHOOLS

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

QUANTIFIERS (TOO MUCH, TOO MANY, ENOUGH)

Very too enough more from Yasin Bal

POLLUTION, by Tom Lehrer

If you visit American city,
You will find it very pretty.
Just two things of which you must beware:
Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air.

Pollution, pollution,
They got smog and sewage and mud.
Turn on your tap and get hot and cold running crud.

See the halibuts and the sturgeons
Being wiped out by detergents.
Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly,
But they don't last long if they try.

Pollution, pollution,
You can use the latest toothpaste,
And then rinse your mouth with industrial waste.

Just go out for a breath of air,
And you'll be ready for medicare.
The city streets are really quite a thrill.
If the hoods don't get you, the monoxide will.

Pollution, pollution,
Wear a gas mask and a veil.
Then you can breathe, long as you don't inhale.

Lots of things there that you can drink,
But stay away from the kitchen sink.
Throw out your breakfast garbage and I've got a hunch,
That the folks downstream will drink it for lunch.

So go to the city, see the crazy people there.
Like lambs to the slaughter,
They're drinking the water
And breathing the air.

BUNGHOLE OF THE WEEK: TO SOW ONE'S WILD OATS

The saying is referring to a European grass species with the formal name Avena fatua, which has for centuries in English been called wild oats. Some botanists think it’s the wild original of cultivated oats. Farmers have since ancient times hated it because it’s a weed that’s useless as a cereal crop, but its seeds have always been difficult to separate from those of useful cereals and so tended to survive and multiply from year to year. The only way to remove it was to tramp the fields and hand-weed it. Even today it’s still a problem, despite modern seed cleaning and selective weedkillers.

So sowing wild oats was the archetypal useless occupation, indeed worse than useless. It’s not surprising that the phrase sowing wild oats was applied figuratively to young men who frittered away their time in stupid or idle pastimes. But there’s a strong sexual association here, too, because the phrase was often applied, in a more or less indulgent way, and always to young men, to what was politely referred to as youthful dissipation. The associations between male sexual activity and sowing seed are obvious enough.

The saying is first recorded in English in 1542, in a tract by the Norfolk Protestant clergyman Thomas Beccon, though I’m told that a related phrase appears in the works of the Roman author Plautus. It’s common in older English literature, no doubt because the image struck a chord in a society that was still mainly agrarian. Here’s a typical example, fromLittle Women by Louisa May Alcott, of 1869: “Boys will be boys, young men must sow their wild oats, and women must not expect miracles”.

Source: http://www.worldwidewords.org/

COMPARATIVES AND SUPERLATIVES

Comparatives superlatives from Carmen Olmedo Rueda

-ED -ING ADJECTIVES

Ing adjectives from muh1211 Abu Awwad