Express Publishing (ELT)

This text and exercise can be used with higher level classes as a fun activity. After the matching task, they could try and make up their own silly author names and books or share any amusing names in their own language.

What do you call some of the most unlucky people in Britain?

Justin Case, Barb Dwyer and Stan Still. It sounds like a bad joke, but a study of online telephone records has revealed that there really are unfortunate people with those names in the UK. Joining them on the list are Terry Bull, Mary Christmas, and Anna Sasin. And just imagine having to introduce yourself to a crowd as Doug Hole, Tim Burr or Dawn Hobbs. Researchers also scoured phone records in the US and found some unlikely names there too. Spare a thought for Anna Prentice, Annette Curtain and Bill Board the next time you sign your name.     read more >>

Here’s Bill Bryson on the word set. “Superficially it looks like a wholly unassuming monosyllable, the verbal equivalent of the single-celled organism. Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb and 10 as a participle adjective. Its meanings are so varied and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words – the length of a short novel – to discuss them all. A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English.”

So set is a polyseme. – a word with many meanings. Now here’s a contronym: the word cleave. This can be to cut in half or stick together. Sanction means permission or forbiddance. If you wind up a watch, you start it, but if you wind up a meeting, you end it. This can be confusing.     read more >>

There’s not much arguing with this sign seen in a farmer’s field. It’s pretty direct. If only the future was always so clear. But it’s not because it doesn’t exist. Tomorrow never comes.     read more >>

Get your pens out
When I was at school dictation meant learning a passage or list of vocabulary at home in preparation for a test the next day. The teacher read out the text or list piece by piece, pausing for us to write what we heard. Our scripts were taken in and marked. A point from a total of 20 was taken off for every mistake in spelling, punctuation or missed out word. If you had over twenty mistakes you got a minus score – which meant a student who wrote nothing could score higher than one with a lot of mistakes!     read more >>