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

E-MAIL WRITING

BUNGHOLE OF THE WEEK: HEAR STH THROUGH/ON THE GRAPEVINE

The expression ‘through the grapevine’ (or sometimes ‘on the grapevine’) is commonly used to mean ‘unofficially’ rather than through an official announcement, for example ‘I heard it on the grapevine that they’re planning to make some people redundant’. Rumours and gossip are spread ‘on the grapevine’ but why ‘the grapevine’? The term originated in the USA and comes from the telegraph system invented in the 19th century by Samuel Morse. The system required thousands of kilometres of telegraph wire to be installed, held in place several meters above the ground by telegraph poles placed at regular intervals along the telegraph route. People thought the wires and poles looked like the strings used to train vines so the telegraph lines became known as ‘the grapevine’. During the American Civil War rumours were often spread via the telegraph lines. When people were asked whether a particular story was true, they would often reply ‘I heard it through the grapevine’.

Source: www.onestopenglish.com

PARTITIVES & CONTAINERS

Partitives from Adriana

IT IS ALWAYS NOW, by Sam Harris

it is always now 
I actually want to talk 
today about death 
now most of us do our best to not to think about death 
but there's always part of our minds that knows 
this can't go on forever 
part of us always knows 
that we're just a doctor's visit away or a phone call away from being starkly 
reminded 
with the fact of our own mortality 
or of those closest to us 
now I'm sure many of you in this room have experienced this in some form 
you must know how uncanny it is 
to suddenly 
be thrown out of the normal course of your life 
and just be given the full time job of not dying 
or caring for someone who is 
but the one thing people tend to realize 
at moments like this is that they wasted a lot of time 
when life was normal 
and it's not just what they, it's not just what they did with their time, it's not just 
that they 
spent too much time working or or compulsively checking email 
it's that they cared about the wrong things 
they regret what they cared about 
their attention was bound up in petty concerns 
year after year 
when life was normal 
and this is a paradox of course because 
we all know 
this epiphany is coming 
I mean, don't you know this is coming? 
don't you know there's going to come a day 
when you'll be sick or someone close to you will die 
and you'll look back 
at the kinds of things that captured your attention 
and you'll think, "what, what was I doing?" 
you know this, and yet if you're like most people, 
you'll spend most of your time in life 
tacitly presuming you'll live forever 
it's like watching a bad movie for the fourth time 
or bickering with your spouse 
I mean this, these things only makes sense 
in light of eternity 
there better be a heaven if we're gonna waste our time like that 
there are ways to 
really live in the present moment 
what what's the alternative? 
it is always now 
however much you feel you may need to plan for the future 
to anticipate it, to mitigate the risks, 
the reality of your life is now 
this may sound trite 
but it's the truth 
it's not quite true as a matter of physics, in fact there is no now 
that encompasses the entire universe you can't talk about an event 
being simultaneously 
occurring here and one 
at the same moment occurring in Andromeda 
the truth is, now is not even well-defined as a matter of neurology because 
we know that inputs to the brain 
come at different moments and that consciousness is built upon layers 
of inputs whose timing to have to be different 
our conscious awareness of the present moment is 
in some relevant sense already a memory 
but as a matter of conscious experience 
the reality of your life 
is always now 
and I think this is a liberating truth about the nature of the human mind in 
fact I think there's probably nothing more important to understand 
about your mind than that 
if you want to be happy 
the past is a memory 
it's a thought 
arising in the present 
the future is merely anticipated, it is another thought 
arising now 
what we truly have 
is this moment 
and this 
and this 
and we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth 
repudiating it, fleeing it, overlooking it, 
and the horror 
is that we succeed 
we we've managed to 
never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we 
are we are 
continually hoping to become happy in the future 
and the future never arrives 
even when we think we're in the present moment we're, we're in very 
subtle ways, always looking over its shoulder 
anticipating what's coming next 
we're always solving a problem 
and it's possible to simply drop your problem 
if only for a moment 
and enjoy whatever is true of your life in the present 
this is not a matter of new information 
or more information, it requires a change in attitude 
it requires a change in the attentiveness you pay 
to your experience in the present moment