You will have to read this a few times!

Mark Twain's plan for the improvement of English spelling

   

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. 

The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. 

Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all. 

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. 

Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli. 

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld. 

   

The First Christmas Card

Today, we send millions of Christmas cards every year. But in fact the Christmas card is a relatively modern invention.

In the Middle Ages, European wood engravers produced prints with religious themes. But the first real Christmas card, as we understand the term today, was designed in London, England in 1840. It went on sale in 1843. The designer was John Callcott Horsley, a well known British painter and member of the Royal Academy. He designed the card at the suggestion of his friend Sir Henry Cole, who was the first director of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Horsley produced 1,000 cards and offered them for sale at 1s (one shilling) each. They were printed on stiff card and coloured by hand, with the greeting: "A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You". The card shows three pictures: in the centre, a family party; to one side the hungry receiving food; to the other side the poor being clothed. Puritans immediately denounced the card, since it showed people drinking in the family party. But with most people the idea was a great success and the Christmas card quickly became very popular.

Christmas cards were not the first greetings cards. Since 1796, with improvements in printing, merchants had been sending cards to their customers offering "best wishes" for the new year. In many countries, Christmas cards gradually became even more popular than New Year's cards.

As Christmas is the birthday of Jesus Christ, cards often show scenes of His nativity. Others show images associated with Christmas such as wintry scenes of snow-laden pines, Father Christmas (Santa Claus), stars, candles or holly. The traditional greeting written on a Christmas card is "Merry Christmas", but many other greetings are also used, such as "Happy Xmas" or "Happy Noel".

English Checker

• denounce: declare publicly to be wrong or evil
• greetings card (BrE) greeting card (AmE)
• His: his (a capital H is often used for God or Jesus)
• holly: a plant with prickly green leaves and red berries laden: heavily loaded or weighed down
• Middle Ages: period of European history from AD 1000 to 1453
• nativity: birth of a child
• the Nativity: the birth of Jesus Christ
• Noel: Christmas (from the French)
• pine: an evergreen tree with needle-shaped leaves
• puritan: person with very strict moral beliefs
• the hungry: hungry people
• the poor: poor people
• Xmas: Christmas (informal, X = initial chi in Greek Khristos)

A CHRISTMAS RECORD

                                   A Christmas record!

 

As a new resident and recent addition to the population of São Paulo, Brasil, I was surprised earlier today as I was traveling on the bus, that one of the stores we passed is already displaying Christmas trees and decorations. As it is only the 8th.of August I thought this was a little premature, but maybe this is normal in Sampa, as I said earlier, I am relatively new to this city , so I wouldn't know!

Well, after seeing that I thought it would be nice to include an informative article about Christmas on my Blog. Hope you enjoy it, and remember only about 130 shopping days to Christmas, so get shopping!!

FRIENDS & FRIENDSHIP.

No one can make you laugh quite the way your friends can, and there's nothing like sharing a few funny friendship quotes with those closest to you to make your day shine a bit brighter. 

Here are 18 of my favorite funny friendship quotes to share with those you love. I hope you enjoy these funny friendship quotes as much as I like sharing them with you!

1. "A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked." ~ Bernard Meltzer

2. "There are three faithful friends, an old wife, an old dog, and ready money." ~ Benjamin Franklin

3. "Money can't buy friends, but you can get a better class of enemy." ~ Spike Milligan

4. "A true friend stabs you in the front." ~ Oscar Wilde

5. "Marriage is a sort of friendship recognized by the police." ~ Anonymous

6. "An old friend will help you move. A good friend will help you move a dead body." ~ Jim Hayes

7. "Give me one friend, just one, who meets the needs of all my varying moods." ~ Esther M. Clark

8. "Love is blind. Friendship tries not to notice." ~ Anonymous

9. "I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the street." ~ Virginia Woolf

10. "Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate." ~ Thomas Jones

11. "I got a lotta best friends. Some o' them I don't even hardly know!" ~ Archie Bunker

12. "It takes a long time to grow an old friend." ~ John Leonard

13. "We must hang together, or surely we shall hang separately." ~ Benjamin Franklin

14. "Friends are God's ways of apologizing for our families." ~ Anonymous

15. "Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and have her nonsense respected." ~ Charles Lamb

16. "You can't stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes." ~ Winnie the Pooh

17 "Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life." ~ Mark Twain

18. "Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one." ~ C.S. Lewis

As you can see, funny friendship quotes are a great way to remember what makes our friendships so special and our friends so dear. Share a few of these funny friendship quotes with the friends who make your life a brighter and your days a delight.

More useless but interesting information!

1. 1,525,000,000 miles of telephone wire are strung across the U.S.

   

2. 101 Dalmatians and Peter Pan (Wendy) are the only two Disney cartoon features with both parents that are present and don't die throughout the movie.

   

3. 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

   

4. 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.

   

5. 123,000,000 cars are being driven down the U.S's highways.

   

6. 160 cars can drive side by side on the Monumental Axis in Brazil, the world's widest road.

   

7. 166,875,000,000 pieces of mail are delivered each year in the U.S.

  

8. 27% of U.S. male college students believe life is "A meaningless existential hell."

   

9. 315 entries in Webster's Dictionary will be misspelled.

  

10. 5% of Canadians don't know the first 7 words of the Canadian anthem, but know the first 9 of the American anthem.

  

11. 56,000,000 people go to Major League baseball each year.

  

12. 7% of Americans don't know the first 9 words of the American anthem, but know the first 7 of the Canadian anthem.

  

13. 85,000,000 tons of paper are used each year in the U.S.

  

14. 99% of the solar systems mass is concentrated in the sun.

  

15. A 10-gallon hat barely holds 6 pints.

  

16. A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.

  

17. A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off.

  

18. A company in Taiwan makes dinnerware out of wheat, so you can eat your plate.

  

19. A cow produces 200 times more gas a day than a person.

  

20. A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.

  

21. A dragonfly has a lifespan of 24 hours.

  

22. A fully loaded supertanker travelling at normal speed takes a least twenty minutes to stop.

  

23. A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue.

  

24. A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can.

  

25. A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.

  

26. A hard working adult sweats up to 4 gallons per day. Most of the sweat evaporates before a person realizes it's there.

  

27. A hedgehog's heart beats 300 times a minute on average.

  

28. A hippo can open its mouth wide enough to fit a 4 foot tall child inside.

  

29. A hummingbird weighs less than a penny.

 

30. A jellyfish is 95 percent water.

  

31. A "jiffy" is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.

  

32. A jumbo jet uses 4,000 gallons of fuel to take off.

  

33. A male emperor moth can smell a female emperor moth up to 7 miles away.

 

34. A man named Charles Osborne had the hiccups for 6 years. Wow.

  

35. A mole can dig a tunnel 300 feet long in just one night.

  

36. A monkey was once tried and convicted for smoking a cigarette in South Bend, Indiana.

  

37. A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.

  

38. A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.

  

39. A Saudi Arabian woman can get a divorce if her husband doesn't give her coffee.

  

40. A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes. 

How stupid is this??

What you are about to read is a true story.............

Scientists at Rolls Royce built a gun specifically to launch dead
chickens at the windshields of airliners, and military jets , all
travelling at maximum velocity.

The idea is to simulate the frequent incidents of 'bird strikes' to
test the strength of the windshields.

American engineers heard about the gun and were eager to test it on
the windshields of their new high speed trains. Arrangements were
made, and a gun was sent to the American engineers.

When the gun was fired, the engineers stood shocked as the chicken
hurled out of the barrel, crashed into the shatterproof shield,
smashed it to smithereens, blasted through the control console,
snapped the engineer's back-rest in two and embedded itself in the
back wall of the cabin, like an arrow shot from a bow.

The horrified Yanks sent Rolls Royce the disastrous results of the
experiment, along with the designs of the windshield and begged the
British scientists for suggestions. 

You're going to love this......

Rolls Royce responded with a one-line memo:
"Defrost the chicken."

This has got to be one of the cleverest E-mails I've seen in a while. Someone out there either has too much spare time or is deadly at Scrabble!

(Wait till you see the last one)!

1.DORMITORY: When you rearrangethe letters: DIRTY ROOM
2.PRESBYTERIAN: When you rearrange the letters: BEST IN PRAYER
3.ASTRONOMER: When you rearrange the letters: MOON STARER
4.DESPERATION:When you rearrange the letters: A ROPE ENDS IT
5.THE EYES: When you rearrange the letters: THEY SEE
6.GEORGE BUSH: When you rearrange the letters: HE BUGS GORE
7.THE MORSE CODE :When you rearrange the letters: HERE COME DOTS
8.SLOT MACHINES: When you rearrange the letters: CASH LOST IN ME
9.ANIMOSITY: When you rearrange the letters: IS NO AMITY
10.ELECTION RESULTS: When you rearrange the letters: LIES - LET'S RECOUNT
11.SNOOZE ALARMS: When you rearrange the letters: ALAS! NO MORE Z'S
12.A DECIMAL POINT: When you rearrange the letters: I'M A DOT IN PLACE
13.THE EARTHQUAKES: When you rearrange the letters: THAT QUEER SHAKE
14.ELEVEN PLUS TWO: When you rearrange the letters: TWELVE PLUS ONE
AND FOR THE GRAND FINALE:
15.MOTHER-IN-LAW: When you rearrange the letters:
WOMAN HITLER Yep! Someone with way too much time on their hands!

(Probably a son-in-law).Bet your friends haven't seen this one!!!

ENGLISH- Sometimes it doesn't make any sense.

Verbally Insane

We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,  but the plural of ox became oxen not oxes.  One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,  yet the plural of moose should never be meese.  You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice, yet the plural of house is houses, not hice. If the plural of man is always called men,  why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?  If I spoke of my foot and show you my feet, and I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?  If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth, why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?  Then one may be that, and three would be those, yet hat in the plural would never be hose,  and the plural of cat is cats, not cose. We speak of a brother and also of brethren, but though we say mother, we never say methren.  Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him, but imagine the feminine, she, shis and shim.  Let's face it - English is a crazy language.  There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;  neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England. We take English for granted.  But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that  quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square,  and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers  don't groce and hammers don't ham?  Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not  one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?  If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught?  If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?  Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.  In what other language do people recite at a play and  play at a recital? We ship by truck but send cargo by ship. We have noses that run and feet that smell. And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same,  while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?   You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down,  in which you fill in a form by filling it out,  and in which an alarm goes off by going on.  So if Dad is Pop, how come Mom isn't Mop? And I've often wondered: How come we park in a driveway and drive on  a parkway? Makes no sense!

How to spell the word "POTATO"

How to spell "Potato"			- back to top
If GH can stand for P as in Hiccough If OUGH can stand for O as in Dough If PHTH can stand for T as in Phthisis If EIGH can stand for A as in Neighbor If TTE can stand for T as in Gazette If EAU can stand for O as in Plateau Then the right way to spell POTATO should be: GHOUGHPHTHEIGHTTEEAU - author unknown.

A cool scrap from Orkut!!!!

Luiz:

Óia só o e-mail que eu mandei pra TOOOOODA a Rapp:

Título:

Legítimo escocês por uma pechincha!!!

texto:

Desculpem o título sensacionalista, mas é que trata-se de uma oportunidade de ouro exclusiva para rappers:

Douglas Watson, escocês legítimo das Highlands de Inverness e excelente professor da língua de Shakespeare, preparou uma promoção imperdível para os rappers que quiserem aprender ou aprimorar seu inglês.

São aulas de gramática, pronunciação, conversação, inglês para viagem e muito mais, individuais ou em grupos, com preços excelentes.

Ah! E a primeira aula é grátis! Ligue e agende a sua:

8787-7299

msn: dougteacher@hotmail.comhttp://www.dougteacher.blogspot.com/

The English Language.

What are the world's most widely spoken languages?

Estimates of how many people speak a language can never be completely precise and therefore vary considerably. However, English English com, together with World English, have come up with the following figures: Mandarin Chinese (837,000,000), English (370,000,000), Spanish (300,000,000), Bengali (189,000,000), Hindi/Urdu (182,000,000), Arabic (174,950,000), Portuguese (170,000,000), Russian (170,000,000), Japanese (125,000,000), German (98,000,000), Javanese (79,000,000), French (75,000,000)

In which countries is English an official language?

English is officially spoken in: Anguilla, Antigua, Bahamas, Barbados, Belau, Bermuda, Botswana, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Antigua, Australia, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Bhutan, Botswana, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Cameroon, Cook Islands, Dominica, Ethiopia, Falkland Islands, Fiji, Gambia, Ghana, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guam, Guyana, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Jamaica, Jersey, Kenya, Kiribati, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Malaysia, Malta, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Micronesia, Midway Islands, Montserrat, Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, New Zealand, Nigeria, Niue, Norfolk Island, Pakistan, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Pitcairn, Puerto Rico, Samoa, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Sri Lanka, St Helena, St Kitts-Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Swaziland, Tokelau, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, US Virgin Islands, Uganda, United Kingdom, United States, Vanuatu, Wake Island, Western Samoa, Zambia, Zambia, Zimbabwe 

I
How many people speak English as a second language?

The number of people believed to speak English as a second language is around 375 million.

So how many speak English in total?

One out of every five people on earth can speak English to some level of competence.

How many people are learning English worldwide?

More than a billion people are in the process of learning the English language.

What percentage of the internet is in English?

More than 80% of home pages on the Web are in English, while the next greatest, German, has only 4.5% and Japanese 3.1%.

Which language has the most words?

English has more words than most comparable world languages.

How many words are there in the English language?

This is an impossible question to answer! It really depends on what words you want to count. But there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary. The unabridged Oxford English Dictionary has about 600,000.

How many words does the average native speaker know?

This depends on the speakers level of education, background etc. but somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000. Shakespeare used more than 30,000 words in his works!  

How many words does the average native speaker use in everyday speech?

The average native speaker of any language uses around a tenth of his vocabulary in everyday speech. In other words, around 1200 to 2000. 

How many words do you need to learn in order to communicate in most situations?

A vocabulary of between 1500 to 2000 words should be enough for most circumstances. The more you know the better because even though you can control the words you use, you can't control the other person. Because of this, you need to learn more words to understand well than you need to speak well. 

What is the longest word in the English language?

The longest word in popular usage is ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM (a movement opposed to the separation of church and state) at 28 letters.

The 45 letter word PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSCOPICSILICOVOLCANOCONIOSIS (a lung disease caused by breathing in certain particles) also appears in many English dictionaries. However, as it's use is strictly medical or scientific, some may not consider this truely part of the English language. 

Dancing Cockatoo

Interesting Facts

1. The longest one-syllable word in the English language is “screeched.”

2. “Dreamt” is the only English word that ends in the letters “mt”

3. Almonds are members of the peach family.

4. The symbol on the “pound” key (#) is called an octothorpe.

5. The dot over the letter ‘i’ is called a tittle.

6. Ingrown toenails are hereditary.

7. The word “set” has more definitions than any other word in the English language.

8. “Underground” is the only word in the English language that begins and ends with the letters “und.”

9. There are only four words in the English language which end in “-dous”: tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.

10. The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.

11. The only other word with the same amount of letters is its plural: pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosesl.

12. The longest place-name still in use is
Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwe-nuakit natahu, a New Zealand hill.

13. Los Angeles’s full name is “El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reinade los Angeles de Porciuncula” and can be abbreviated to 3.63% of its size,L.A.

14. An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.

15. Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.

16. Alfred Hitchcock didn’t have a belly button. It was eliminated when he was sewn up after surgery.

17. Telly Savalas and Louis Armstrong died on their birthdays.

18. Donald Duck’s middle name is Fauntleroy.

19. The muzzle of a lion is like a fingerprint - no two lions have the same pattern of whiskers.

20. A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.

21. There is a seven-letter word in the English language that contains ten words without rearranging any of its letters, “therein”: the,there, he, in, rein, her, here, ere, therein, herein.

22. Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.

23. A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.

24. It’s impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

25. Cranberries are sorted for ripeness by bouncing them; a fully ripened cranberry can be dribbled like a basketball.

26. The letters KGB stand for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti

26. ‘Stewardesses’ is the longest English word that is typed with only the left hand.

28. The combination “ough” can be pronounced in nine different ways; the following sentence contains them all: “A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.”

29. The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.

30. Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order, as does arsenious, meaning “containing arsenic.”

31. Emus and kangaroos cannot walk backwards, and are on the Australian seal for that reason.

32. Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten.

33. The word “Checkmate” in chess comes from the Persian phrase “Shah Mat,” which means “the king is dead.”

Bob Marley Quotes

"Don’t gain the world and lose your soul, wisdom is better than silver or gold. "

"When you smoke the herb, it reveals you to yourself."

"I don’t stand for the black man’s side, I don’ t stand for the white man’s side.I stand for God’s side."

"If you get down and quarrel everyday, you’re saying prayers to the devil."

"Don’t forget your history nor your destiny."

"In this bright future you can’t forget your past."

"When one door is closed, don’t you know, another is open."

"Me only have one ambition, y’know. I only have one thing I really like to see happen. I like to see mankind live together - black, white, Chinese, everyone - that’s all."

"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our mind."

"Herb is the healing of a nation, alcohol is the destruction."

"Just can’t live that negative way…make way for the positive day."

"Every time I plant a seed, He say kill it before it grow, he say kill it before they grow."

"When the race gets hard to run. It means you just can’t take the pace."

"Don’t worry about a thing, every little thing is gonna be alright."

"My music will go on forever. Maybe it’s a fool say that, but when we know facts we can say
facts. My music will go on forever."

"The good times of today, are the sad thoughts of tomorrow."

"I’ve been here before and will come again, but I’m not going this trip through."

"You ain’t gonna miss your water until your well runs dry."

"Bob Marley isn’t my name. I don’t even know my name yet."

"Every man gotta right to decide his own destiny."

"Free speech carries with it some freedom to listen."

"Get up, stand up, Stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, Don’t give up the fight."

"Just can’t live that negative way…make way for the positive day!”

Nice to meet you!

Hello, my name is Douglas Watson. I was born in Inverness, Scotland. There, before leaving, I worked as a sales manager for a multinational company. I also lived and worked in London for three years.
In 1998, I decided to move to Brasil, I lived in Rio Grande o Sul for five months. I then left RS and went to live in Florianópolis, where I stayed for eight years. I began to teach English in Floripa and worked for various schools there, including CCAA, British & American and Words. After two years, I started to teach privately, and have been doing this since then.
I recently moved to São Paulo (Moema) and I intent to begin teaching here.

Hope you can come back and visit again sometime.

D.W.

Aprenda inglês com quem tem experiência.

DOUGLAS WATSON - ENGLISH TEACHER

• Professor nativo

• Método Oxford

• 10 anos de experiência

• Aulas VIP ou em grupo

• Pronúncia e conversação

• Aulas "In Company"

• Os melhores Preços de São Paulo

• Preços especiais para grupos

• Moema, Brooklin, Vila Olímpia, Pinheiros, Vila Mariana e Jardins

Entre em contato e agende uma aula sem compromisso.

dougteacher@hotmail.com

See you!!!